


in technicolor

by deniigiq



Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Academia, Attempted Murder, Canon Disabled Character, Case Fic, Community - Freeform, Dogs, Gangs, Gen, Ghosts, Going undercover, Heist, Identity Reveal, Interrogation, Lucky makes his grand appearance, M/M, Missing Persons, Murder, Piercings, Police, Police & Vigilante Team Up, Shenanigans, Spirits, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Tracking, Underground, Violence, a bitty bit of witches, an 'attempt.', an attempt to study this people is made, culture clash, fuck its growing, it's just a mess that entertains me yo, that was not intentions, well failed heist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2019-09-05 02:32:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 74,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16801942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Brett sighed and looked down at the folder in his hand.“Your name is Peter, right?”“Lawyer.”“Peter, we haven’t even started talking. Let’s just take a minute to ease up.”“Lawyer.”“Bud, we haven’t charged you with a crime. This is just talking.”“Law. Yer.”Goddamn.(Brett's encounters with Team Red/vigilantes and their weird fucking way of helping)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello, this is just a really brief self-indulgent interlude which entertains me. Don't think too much will come of it, but there might be a few little chapters. It's all silliness and not really seriously part of the DFV, but you can interpret it that way if it makes you happy.

Brett got to the station and was met with the goddamned cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

There was no Joseph in sight, but there was a younger, carbon copy of Senator Jim Morita standing in one cornering raising hell in a small sea of eye-searing yellow while the leader of the sticky-plastic blue crew on the other side of the pen shouted at an officer and pointed violently at him. Brett didn’t quite have time to figure out what that was all about before Maynard was grabbing his arm and dragging him through a veritable ocean of painfully colored blazers into the Captain’s office. The door closed and Brett found himself in a circle of crossed arms and heavy brows.

“Debate teams?” he found himself asking. Everyone looked at him piteously.

“Academic Decathlon,” Ellen corrected. “The best and the brightest of this very fine city.”

The sarcasm was strong in this one.

Several people started to yell outside and were met by a series of bellowing officers to put that shit down.

“I need more context,” Brett said.

“All those nerd-children out there are lucky to be alive,” the captain informed him and the group at large, “It is my understanding that some college board members came along to watch their competition today. And someone, who is now sitting in Interrogation Room 5, decided that he was still unhappy that his kid didn’t get into Columbia as planned. Decided that he was going to set that record straight with a hired team of gunmen to help Mr. Coleman from Columbia’s board of admissions reconsider.”

Fucking rich kid parents, yo.

Brett’s mom had been so happy he’d graduated highschool she’d cried for weeks. When Fogs had gotten into Columbia, his family had been thrilled, but he’d had to pop around the corner to grab Brett and bring him over to help him explain to the Nelsons why the fuck their kid was doing College 2.0. They just weren’t getting it. What the hell is grad school? Is it like a certification thing? Why do you need that? Columbia is very good, yes?

“Thankfully,” the captain said, tearing Brett away from fond (were they though?) memories. “Our friendly neighborhood Spiderman just so happened to be present at this gig and just so happened to disarm five gunmen and set off a fire-alarm before our guys even got the call.”

“Fucking weird place for Spiderman to be,” Brett noted out loud.

The pitying looks came back.

Oh, _no._

The captain bowed his head.

Oh, _fuck_.

“He’s in room 3,” the captain said, “And his principal has more political connections than everyone in this entire building combined and he—and I cannot emphasize this enough—is a minor. So the next few hours are going to proceed with absolutely zero leaks. This boy, God help our souls, did our job for us and we need him to give a statement and we are going to do everything in our power not to fuck up this kid’s life because he’s better at our jobs than we are, do you all understand?”

A chorus of bobbing heads, followed by Ellen timidly raising a hand. The captain stared at her coldly.

“Sir, are we not charging him with executing vigilante justice?”

The captain continued to stare at her coldly.

“If he was two years older, Detective Hernandez, then yes. We would. But, things as they are, I am _hesitant_ to arrest a sixteen-year-old child when there is a greater opportunity that we can talk him out of this before he gets in too deep. Any other questions?”

Brett had one.

“Is he sixteen, or sixteen-adjacent?”

“Sixteen and two months, Lord help us. You may proceed without parental presence. Mahoney, you got a way with kids, you’re on point with Spidey. Brewer, you’ve got our other friend.”

Brett opened the door and immediately regretted every decision that had ever led up to this point in his life. He valiantly did not slam it closed and pass the buck. He walked in and closed the door behind him and tried very hard not to respond to the fierce fucking look the second tiniest teenager in the world was giving him.

He had one of those eye-searing blazers on over his suit. His suit had seen better days, now that Brett was up close enough to tell.

He opened his mouth and the kid snarled at him.

In any other circumstances, the floppy hair and big brown eyes might have been sweet. Right now, they told the story of a kid learning how to cut a bitch.

Brett sat down and leaned back in the chair. The kid pressed himself flat against the wall. He was no dumby, this one. One of the “best and the brightest” in his class after all. Brett looked him over and thought that what he really could use was an extra meal or two.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Thirsty? I can get you a coke or a water or something?”

The boy didn’t let up on his snarl. It seemed kind of familiar, now that Brett was tuned into it.

Oh dear god, say it ain’t so.

“Maybe coffee?” he offered.

“Cut the shit. Read me my rights. I want a lawyer.”

Someone had briefed this child on exactly what to do in this situation. And Brett had a sneaking suspicion he knew exactly who that fucking horn head was.

Brett sighed and looked down at the folder in his hand.

“Your name is Peter, right?”

“Lawyer.”

“Peter, we haven’t even started talking. Let’s just take a minute to ease up.”

“Lawyer.”

“Bud, we haven’t charged you with a crime. This is just talking.”

“Law. Yer.”

Goddamn.

“You want us to call your mom, Peter? Would that make you feel better?”

The kid extracted himself from the wall and leaned both his elbows on the table. The right one was just skin and scabs. The material of the blazer had been completely ripped through, as had the material of the suit. The mask had been confiscated.

“You know what would make me feel better, sir?” Peter asked, low and dangerous.

Brett was pretty sure he knew.

“A lawyer?”

“Ding ding ding. I’ll wait.”

Brett sighed and left the room. Maybe this one needed to sit for a little while before they tried to do anything with him.

“Brett, you shithead, he doesn’t have a mom,” Ellen scolded in the hallway.

Ah. Good to know. Would have been even better to know before he went in there and insulted the fuck out of the goddamned Spiderman.

“What’s he got then? And who’s his lawyer? I get the feeling we ain’t getting through this one without the guy being on speed dial.”

“He’s got an aunt.”

“Got an uncle, then?”

Maybe this was one of those man-to-man conversations teenage boys seemed to respond to.

“Uh. _Had_ an uncle. Guy was murdered a year and a half ago.”

Shit. _Shit_.

“Aunt’s name?”

“May Parker. Her husband was Peter’s biological uncle. Kid’s parents up and vanished. Suspected deceased around ten years ago.”

Motherfucker. Did they all have to have tragic backstories? Was that a pre-req to vigilantism? When would they get a simple ole violent asshole, high on brain smashing?

“Call the Aunt and get the lawyer’s number. None of this shit is going to be easy.”

Two hours in and Peter wasn’t budging. He’d tucked himself into the wall again and had apparently had a nap in Brett’s absence. At least it looked like a nap from the cameras. He’d wrapped his arms around his knees in the chair and hadn’t moved a muscle. He didn’t move when Brett walked in with a can of Pepsi.

He set it on the table and pushed it the kid’s way.

No response.

“You feeling chatty, yet, kid?”

No response.

Very uncharacteristic of the friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Emphasis on the “friendly.” According to the principal and his bevy of ducklings, Peter was a mishmash of too nice and too dumb and too honest and too nerdy to have been involved with any of this. They all insisted that there had to be some mistake, Peter wasn’t Spiderman, and even if he was, he’d saved their lives. Where was the crime in that?

It was very hard to make a fuckload of kids understand that Peter wasn’t in trouble even though the police were trying to question him.

They all heard “we just need to take his statement” as “we’re going to waterboard him until he gives up the ghost” and freaked out all over again and, despite their principal’s best efforts, refused to leave the station until their compatriot was able to leave with them.

Talk about solidarity, damn. Brett’s highschool classmates would have left him to die in an alligator pit if they could have. Hell, they’d have stuck around to watch.

“You’ve got some really good friends, Peter,” he noted. “They’re staging a sit-in on your behalf.”

Peter showed no emotion at this.

“Lawyer,” he said instead, muffled by his knees. “Matt Murdock or Franklin Nelson. I’ve got their numbers memorized.”

Ah.

Because of course.

“Franklin’s a friend of mine,” Brett tried. The kid lifted his head to stare at him harshly over his knees. Didn’t believe him for a second.

“Good. Call him.”

Brett almost laughed.

“We’ve been neighbors since we were six years old, believe it or not. He used to have even stupider hair.”

“Mr. Nelson’s hair isn’t stupid. Take it back. And call him.”

Oh. Touched a nerve there. Interesting.

“Nah, I’ve seen every iteration of his hair, trust me. It’s pretty stupid.”

Peter’s brow lowered and Brett could tell he was clenching his jaw.

“I’ll stop talking shit if you start talking to me, Peter,” he offered.

“You call my mom?”

Ouch. Nasty. Fair, but nasty.

Brett cleared his throat.

“We called you aunt to get your lawyer’s number.”

“You got it?”

“Well, yes. She’s freaking out, Peter. Obviously—”

“It’s fine. She’s used to it. Call my lawyer.”

Brett cocked his head at this little ball of fury. The Peter the ducklings out front had described very much did not jive with this Peter and this Peter very much did not jive with Spiderman.

“Why’d you do it, man? Could have waited for the police.”

“Y’all are pigs. Lawyer.”

“Is that what they say in Queens, Peter? Or did you hear that from one of your buddies?”

Peter shoved his knees off the chair and sat, spine straight, rigid.

“That’s what they said at my neighbor’s fucking funeral, after one of your guys unloaded six bullets into his chest, detective. He was fourteen. Smoking some pot. Apparently, that’s a death sentence for a black kid these days. So you’ll understand why I’m not hot on chatting with you. Maybe stop murdering my friends first. Lawyer. I’m not talking to you anymore.”

Well. It wasn’t like he was wrong.

Peter’s aunt was pissed and she was making that very fucking clear to Ellen in the bullpen. Fogs wasn’t happy either. He, however, remained dead calm and tipped his chin up at Brett as they made eye contact across the room. He touched May’s elbow and strode forward to meet him.

“Giving you a hard time, Brett?” he asked once they were face to face.

“Boy’s a fucking daydream wrapped in a nightmare, Nelson. You teach him that?”

“Peter has a right to representation.”

“Peter hasn’t been charged with a crime.”

“Great. Let him go then.”

“Unless he talks, Peter _may_ be charged with a very big crime, Fogs.”

They had reached a stalemate.

“Brett, it’s either me or Matt and you know how Matt likes to get loud when there’s drama to be had. You really want your department to end up in the news for violating the rights of a minor?”

Fuck, no. And the farther Matthew Murdock stayed from this station, the better. Brett did not growl at Foggy, but it was a close thing.

“Aunt can’t come in.”

“She won’t.”

Foggy entered the room and it was like all the tension fell out of the kid’s body. The door closed and Brett thought that he heard muffled crying.

He felt pretty solidly like shit.

While Foggy talked to Peter, Brett went over to go deal with the shrieking nutjob in Room 5. Dude was working himself up and throwing shit at the interviewer. Brett wasn’t surprised. Anyone with the money and audacity to shoot up a school function because his entitled fucking son didn’t get into the school he wanted was bound to think that he was the one being inconvenienced here.

Angry Suburban Dad didn’t understand why the fuck they weren’t charging Spiderman for, well, existing mostly. He wanted Spiderman charged for everything under the sun, including assault on his own person. When asked how exactly, Spiderman assaulted him, he made up a pretty fantastic story about the kid trying to choke him out.

Peter, two rooms over, wasn’t tall enough to choke this guy out the way he was describing. He’d have had to shove the guy onto the ground to do it the way Angry Dad claimed he had, but Angry Suburban dad didn’t know or care how garottes or choking worked, nor did he want to hear that the red marks on his neck were a result of his angry flushing.

He’d just launched into a fascinating story about how it was really Spiderman who’s hired all those guys when Foggy stepped out and signaled to Brett that they were ready to talk.

Brett sat down and read through Peter’s rights and the kid didn’t look up at him once. Foggy had to prompt him gently for him to give a verbal confirmation that he’d had his rights read to him.

“Pete, just before we get started, you wouldn’t happen to have twelve grand at your disposal, would you?” Brett asked.

That got the kid to look up at him.

“What?”

“We got all these gunmen saying they were promised twelve grand. Guy next door is claiming that was you who promised them that. Is that a possibility I need to look into, big guy?”

Peter didn’t know he was being won over, bless his heart, but the look he gave Brett was just about comical.

“Uh, I’m a scholarship student?”

“So that’s a ‘no,’ then?”

“Yes, sir.”

Brett raised an eyebrow and looked at Foggy who shrugged lightly. All respect, now, huh Mr. Parker? Lawyers were amazing.

He leaned forward on the table.

“Alright, let’s revisit my earlier question, then. Why did you jump into that mess, Pete? Why not wait for the cops?”

Peter leaned slightly against Foggy. He didn’t want to make eye contact again.

“It would take too long,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“I call the cops all the time. Wait for them to get there most of it. It takes a long time.”

That? Was entirely true. Spiderman put in calls to stations all over the city, like he said, all the time. After most confrontations. If he waited there until they got there, yeah. He’d have a pretty damn good idea about how long it actually took for the officers to show up.

“Did you think these guys were going to start shooting soon, then?”

A flat look.

“They started shooting as soon as they came in.”

Brett blinked.

“And you were already ready to go? What, you wear that thing under your clothes every day?”

The flat look remained. Peter wasn’t playing that game. Foggy didn’t try to coach him either. Brett sucked in a breath.

“Okay, pal, here’s what we’re going to do. You give me a play-by-play of everything that happened over the last couple hours, and then you have a talk with my captain about this whole vigilante thing you’ve got going on, and then you go home. Easy as that. No charges if you’re happy to suffer through quietly. What do you think?”

Peter leaned closer to Foggy and looked up to him for the answer. Foggy leaned over and whispered to him. Peter studied the table and chewed his lip for a second before nodding.

“My client will agree to your terms,” Foggy said for him.

Thank Jesus.

“Alright, bud. Let’s start with the morning. When did y’all leave for the competition?”

Once you got past all the briefing and animosity, Peter was a sweet kid. A really good kid. An infuriatingly good kid.

He was fucking sharp, too, with a killer memory. He could tell Brett everything from the size of the door entrances to the auditorium, to the color of the pants each shooter was wearing. He remembered exactly how he’d taken down four of the five guys, the last one he said he thought maybe had caught shit from one of his AcaDec compadres with a chair. He remembered the man screaming in Room 5 because he wore a hideous tie and a mint green collared shirt, and Pete and his buddies had been making jokes about it.

He knew exactly fuck all about guns, though, which Brett was trying not to find endearing. It was hard because his descriptions of them were like how someone would describe a dog.

“Like this big,” Peter said, gesturing with his hands, “And kinda gray. Not black, like gray. Really noisy.”

“Do you remember if it was semi-automatic? Or did these guys seem like they had ammunition with them?”

Peter stared at him owlishly, then up to Foggy, then back at him.

“What makes it semi?”

Bless him, he didn’t know what the fuck gun was shooting at him, just that it was shooting. 

“Have you ever shot a gun, Peter?”

The kid lit up at a question he had an answer to.

“Wade took me to a range once, but he said I’m never allowed to go back, ever again.”

“Wade?”

Foggy intervened and said that Wade was a family friend.

“Wade is good with guns then?”

“Yeah, he was in the army. In Canada.”

Canada.

Brett looked at Foggy. He shrugged again.

“Guy’s Canadian, man, what else you want? Peter’s a shit shot, is the point he doesn’t know he’s making.”

The kid was honestly insulted and hurt.

“I’m not that bad.” Foggy patted him sympathetically.

If that was Foggy’s response, and Foggy’s ability to use a gun was in the fucking negatives on this scale they were using, than Peter must be allowed near firearms never.

Peter’s reason to Spiderman out was pretty straightforward: they were shooting at me and my friends and all those important VIP folks in the corner, and y’all take an age and a half to get on the scene, so I just dealt with it.

Technically, he’d been acting in self defense as he was, in fact, one of the be-blazered minors there for a nerd competition. The fact that he’d brought his suit with him was also kind of miracle, because he admitted that he’d considered shoving it in his locker before he left for the bus. But, he said, Mr. Stark and him had had a talk about treating very expensive, advanced equipment with respect, and Peter did not want to have a repeat of this talk, as, according to him, it had taken _eons._

Then the guy in Room 5 started screaming loud enough that they all could hear it through the walls, and Peter’s trust in Brett started to crumble a little bit.

Because, suit and enhancements aside, Peter was sixteen years old and the man in that room was threatening to kill him and anyone related to him, which, importantly, were some of the people sitting in the bull pen. Foggy pulled the kid closer to him and assured him softly that the guy was bluffing. Talking big to puff himself up. Peter nodded, but Brett could see that he wasn’t convinced.

He glanced at the door and leaned forward a little bit.

“That guy is going to jail for a very long time,” he promised Peter. “He might not get out before he’s a very old man. He’s trying to make himself feel better right now. In a few hours here, he’s not gonna have the time or the resources to lay a finger anywhere near you or anyone else out there ever again, okay?”

He got wide eyes and a little nod. Brett waited until the shrieking guy was escorted to a different room, out of earshot of their own and the bullpen before he stood up.

“I think we’re done here, Mr. Parker. Thanks for your cooperation. What’s going to happen next is—”

“Can I see my aunt?”

Uh. Will the aunt refuse to let him talk to the captain?

“Let me check on that.”

“Can you tell her I’m okay, at least? She says I give her ulcers.”

Yeah, he could do that.

Brett then stood through the most awkward meeting in his life as the captain tried to turn his “don’t do drugs” speech into a “don’t fight crime” one.

Besides all the other issues with this situation, the “don’t do drugs” speech was intended for eight-year-olds, not sixteen-year-olds, and the captain could not, for the life of him, figure out why Peter was not laughing at his corny Disney jokes and comparisons.

All he got was a dead-eyed stare.

“Captain America told me that nine out of ten cops are incompetent shitheads.”

Uh-huh. Because of course he did. Captain, what exactly is your rousing comeback to that?

“Well, maybe in Captain America’s time—”

“And Mr. Stark and Double D and Cap never agree on anything, by they all agree on that.”

Uh- _huh_ , say more, child. The captain was faltering and Brett needed to store this memory, full and complete, in his heart for the next time he got dressed down for some petty shit.

“Well, Stark and Daredevil aren’t exactly pillars of the community, Peter.”

“So, I’m supposed to ignore Captain America telling me I’m doing a good job because you told me to? He doesn’t lock me in rooms for a million hours, sir. He tells me bad jokes without all this other stuff. “

“Peter, you are young, and I understand that you want to make a difference—”

“I am making a difference.”

“Right. I’m not saying you aren’t. I’m just saying that there is a system in place for—”

“I call you guys when I’m done making a difference, almost every time too. Wade always tells me not to, but I do it anyways.”

The captain paled.

“Wade, as in Wade Wilson?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

Brett found that he had two expressions to describe this situation and they were “sweating bullets” and “shitting bricks.” He hadn’t realized that family friend Wade was fucking Deadpool, but somehow, the kid’s lack of concern was feeding into his own.

Wade Wilson had tried to teach this boy how to use a gun and had been so horrified with the results that he’d banned the kid from using them for life. That, in Brett’s new fucked up perspective, was a good thing.

“Peter,” the captain said, clinging to the vestiges of the role of Good Cop, “If you’re going to do this crazy thing, then you at least have the right to choose who you’re going to do it with. And Deadpool? Son, that man’s trouble. He’s—”

“My friend.”

“No, he’s just making you _think_ he’s your friend, Peter. He’s using you.”

“For what?”

“For—”

“It’s a trick question, I know what. It’s friendship.”

“He tell you that?”

The captain was almost panting in his desperation to steer this conversation somewhere productive at this point. Peter hummed.

“No, he didn’t tell me that. But sometimes he shakes me really hard and says if I ever do that again, he’ll kill me himself. That means he’s worried. Because we’re friends and my aunt says I give him ulcers, too. Are we done here? I want to go home. I’ve got homework and Mr. Stark has to yell at me for half an hour and there’s only so many hours in a night, sir.”

Foggy was smug and Brett was ignoring him and the non-shitty coffee he was holding out to him.

The station was the quietest it had been in days with its new lack of blazers.

“C’mon, Mahoney, it’s coffee. I have not poisoned it. It is not a bribe.”

Fat chance, Nelson.

“I just wanted to thank you for treating my client with such respect and sensitivity.”

You client is causing my captain to endure an identity crisis as we speak.

“Brett.”

Ugh.

He took the coffee and his coat and followed Foggy’s gleeful grin outside into the freezing air. Fogs was beyond pleased with himself and with Brett. Peter had gone home. There had been zero coercion. Zero violence. Not even a hint of media presence. The kid only had to deal with his buddies now, and apparently, he had already convinced them that he’d stolen the Spiderman suit during his internship and it had done all the work for him. No, he didn’t think the real Spiderman would mind.

“He’s a good kid,” Foggy said.

“He’s a fucking stupid kid,” Brett countered.

“I think he likes you, Brett. Pete’s a good ally to have. He’s even funny once you get to know him.”

“He thinks Deadpool’s his friend, Fogs. That’s trouble.”

Foggy laughed.

“Well, if you ever saw them together man, you’d know that Wade would kill an army for Peter. He does try to keep some distance there, if it helps with the heartburn.”

Brett blew out a cloud of air.

“Take care of him, Fogs.”

“Will do, detective.”


	2. who you gonna call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you’ve got a violent heist situation with some crazy enhanced person running up buildings, who you gonna call? 
> 
> Foggy fucking Nelson. 
> 
> First anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> take this madness and don't question it too much or your brain will hurt

“No one say a fucking word,” Brett threatened the other detectives in his car with him.

The silence didn’t last long.

“I think,” Willows started.

“This is,” Maynard added in with a grin.

“A job for Spiderman,” Ellen finished off.

Aw, fuck. Here we go.

When you’ve got a violent heist situation with some crazy enhanced person running up buildings, who you gonna call?

Foggy fucking Nelson.

First anyways.

“Brett, this is my living room.”

“Foggy, this is detective Maynard, Willows, and Hernandez. We are, unfortunately, in need of your services as an intermediary.”

“At one in the morning?”

“It’s kind of time-sensitive.”

“Does your mom know you go around knocking up the neighborhood at one in the morning?”

“Don’t you dare call her and phrase it that way.”

Foggy tried Peter’s cell phone but didn’t get anything. He tapped his lip.

“Oh, actually. You know who he’s probably with?”

Don’t say Deadpool.

“Daredevil.”

That’s worse, actually. Go back.

Foggy had Daredevil’s number too. He turned the phone on speaker.

“Hi, dying right now. Call you back?” Daredevil answered to the tune of rustling clothing and fists meeting flesh.

“I guess,” Foggy huffed.

They waited five minutes. Maynard asked Fogs where he’d gotten his couch and he wrote down the website for her. They debated the merits of suede. The phone rang again.

“You’re on speaker. Are you still dying?” Foggy asked. There was heavy breathing on the other side.

“30%?” was the uncertain answer.

“Closer to 20 or 40?”

“20.”

“Alright you’ll do. Is Spidey with you?”

“Huh?”

“Detective Mahoney and friends are in my living room. Is Spidey with you?”

“At one in the morning? Nah, he’s out on his own tonight, is it dire? I can track him down?”

Foggy looked at Brett with a raised eyebrow. Brett cleared his throat.

“It’s a little dire, Daredevil. We’d appreciate it if you’d do that. Where can we meet you?”

“Uhhhh,” Daredevil drawled, evidently trying to figure out where the fuck he was. “Let’s go with Bryant’s Park? Don’t think he’s that far away, let’s say half an hour?”

This was Brett’s life now. Setting up dates with vigilantes.

“Roger that.”

Brett needed the chanting in his car to quiet the fuck down because he was not excited to meet Daredevil and he didn’t need these bozos fattening the guy’s head even more.

Willows called him a stick in the mud and informed him that he was going to get it printed on mickey mouse ears for his monitor in the station. He found that he had no fucks to give about this.

They were at a disadvantage here and Foggy and Daredevil knew it. Brett’s team had to trust all these underworld punks if they were going to find _their_ underworld punk, and Brett wasn’t even going to pretend to be happy about it.

Nevertheless, they got to Bryant’s park and were shortly thrown into cardiac arrest by the Devil crashing through the bushes behind them.

He’d done that shit on purpose, the asshole. He wouldn’t stop fucking laughing. He _loved_ having the upper hand for once.

“Double D, that’s not nice,” their miniature asshole observed above them. He hopped down smoothly from the tree to pout at his buddy.

Double D did not give a shit, he was leaning against the tree trying to catch his breath.

“Dude,” Spidey scolded. “You’re absorbing Wade’s energy again.”

That earned him, not one, but two busted middle fingers. Spidey remained unimpressed and leaned out Brett’s way.

“You rang, detective?”

Fuck. Yes, he had.

Now that he knew the face under that mask, Brett had located a hidden well of anxiety within himself for the kid flinging himself off buildings in pursuit of a highly volatile, extremely dangerous adversary.

Daredevil watched him go in interest, then turned to Brett.

“They a fighter?”

“Who? Our perp?” Brett asked. Daredevil waited patiently for him to get past the dumb question.

“Yeah, she’s good at hand to hand. Blew through the museum guards like they were nothing.”

A horrible smirk stretched slowly across the Devil’s face.

“Sounds like fun,” he pointed out like a monster.

The other detectives decided that he was devastatingly handsome.

“Uh-uh. No. We don’t need two vigilantes,” Brett warned, “I’m already catching shit for going to one of y’all. I don’t need any more of your—”

“Kid’s shit at hand-to-hand. I mean, not hopeless, but you know. Could be better.”

Lord, Jesus above, how did he know that? No. Brett knew exactly how he knew that.

“He’s a _good_ kid, DD. You leave him the fuck alone.”

All those pretty teeth and not an innocent bone among them. How the hell did he keep all of them in his head?

“Too late, Detective. Me and Wade have been corrupting him for nearly a year now. The current task is getting him to say ‘fuck’ in front of other people.”

That poor, innocent child. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve Tony Stark to begin with, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve Daredevil on top of that.

“Don’t you got Castle or someone to piss off tonight?” he asked to redirect the guy’s interest.

Daredevil jerked in his direction like an excited hunting dog.

“He around? You seen him? Which way?”

It was like holding a tennis ball.

“Sighting up around Harlem. Go play.”

And just like that, Double D went crashing through the bushes once again.

Brett endured exactly one hour of his fellows fawning over Daredevil’s sexiness before Spidey caught them following up on a lead in the Upper West Side.

He held out a handful of material and a black backpack.

Some of the material of his own suit was missing and there was a perfect circle of teeth on his inner forearm. Brett looked at the evidence, then looked up at Spidey.

“You have all your shots, Pete?” he asked.

Peter’s wide, white suit eyes gave nothing away.

“Can people give each other rabies?” he asked. “I tried to google it but Karen’s being glitchy tonight.”

Karen…Page?

“No, the Karen—she’s my, uh. Nevermind. Here, take this.”

The second the bag left Peter’s hand, it was snatched and a speeding ball of red went hurtling off down the street with it to get hit by a car. The resulting crash and shattering of glass was deafening.

Peter shouted in frustration and grabbed at his head.

“Wade, _no_ ,” he cried. “Why would you even _do_ that?”

“’Cause it’s a fake,” Daredevil’s voice interrupted from behind him. Peter whipped around and punched him right in the side of the head without thinking and, upon realizing when he’d done, started apologizing immediately. Daredevil stopped swearing long enough to check for blood, then shook himself upright.

“That was a good one,” he hummed approvingly, licking at a newly bitten lip. Spidey was not soothed by this. He offered to go get bandages, then got stuck between dealing with that or the now-burning car in the street.

Daredevil grabbed a fist full of the back of his suit before he freaked out entirely.

“No one’s hurt,” he said, “No burning flesh, no screaming.”

“But what about Wade?” the kid whined.

Brett thought it was a little unnecessary to point out that Wade Wilson could not die, that was kind of his thing. DD, however, conveyed most of the same message through a shrug. He licked at his lip again and started dragging Spidey off the opposite direction, ignoring the kid’s protests.

“Shush,” he finally snapped after a few yards, “All’s not lost. Wade’s dumb ass is fine. He’s stop-drop-and-rolling for the neighborhood kids. Gimme your arm.”

This was a wild statement in itself, but of all the possible statements to follow this up, Brett could not have expected, “don’t lick it” to be one of them.

He asked Maynard to punch him so he could make sure he was on the right planet still. She did. He was.

Daredevil promised Peter he wouldn’t lick the bite, he was just going to smell it.

“That’s still weird, Double D.”

“You want your jewel thief or no?”

“Fine. Don’t lick it, though, for real. I think it’s rabies.”

There was a thoughtful pause over in that corner of insanity, followed abruptly by a betrayed squawk and then a full volume cry for “WADE.”

This? This was every reason why Brett didn’t work with vigilantes. Every single reason, including the ones he’d never thought of before. The other detectives were charmed right out of their minds, like children on a fieldtrip.

Wade Wilson appeared as the fiery blaze around the corner was put out. He was bagless. He was _huge._ And he stopped dead in his tracks to follow a path with a wider berth around Brett and his troop of detectives.

His means of handling the immaturity going on just a little further down the alley was to toss little Peter over his shoulder and put a finger in Daredevil’s face.

Peter struggled to be put down while explaining the rabies situation. Daredevil bit Deadpool’s finger in the meantime and earned himself a headlock.

“We are all _very_ annoying today,” Deadpool sang, wrenching poor Double D’s head back and forth and he swayed all three of them. Peter hammered at his back and told him that they didn’t have time for this, there was an angry jewel thief lady getting away.

Deadpool did not see how this was their problem. He informed Spidey that that was fine, but they had all agreed that the next team target was some Fisk associate, which made Daredevil stop struggling and remember why he’d gone out that night to begin with. He joined Spidey in trying to escape Deadpool’s grasp.

Brett’s sister would have called everything happening right then a ‘hot mess.’ So he decided he was going to condemn it a ‘hot mess’ too. He decided he’d had it with vigilantes for the night.

He’d barely gotten two steps back in the direction of the car, when he found himself being yanked back by the back of his coat. He grabbed for his gun but found himself staring up at the guy who could not die. Deadpool wasn’t looking back at him. He had zeroed in on something across the street. The other two menaces had done the same. All three of them, suddenly still as statues.

“Engaging Plan B,” Deadpool announced. “Red, you got a job to do, take her home and keep her there.”

He released the demon and the Devil was leaping through traffic not a breath of air later.

“Spidey, find the bag,” Deadpool instructed.

“Roger that.” The kid was gone before Brett blinked. Deadpool turned on their quad of badges and coats.

“Y’all are gonna want to distance yourself for a little while,” he told them calmly, “Go for a walk. Grab a cup of coffee. Your gal will be in the green off 12th avenue in about an hour.”

Brett was almost scared to ask why the sudden interest and organization, but Deadpool made his suit eyes wink at them before he sauntered off, whistling, in the direction the Devil had gone.

“This is so exciting,” Ellen chirped as they all closed the car doors again. “We should all just become vigilantes.”

The idea was appreciated but vetoed. They headed to 12th avenue to wait.

They got there and found nothing but didn’t have to wait long before the excitement found them. Daredevil came screaming across the green, followed by their museum thief who was suddenly far less investing in getting away with her goods than she was hellbent on stabbing him to death. Daredevil, for his part, kept stopping every so often to goad her into stabbing him to death. They collided and tussled every twenty yards or so, and every time, Daredevil threw the gal back and took off again.

It was less fighting and more the deadliest game of tag ever.

Brett then nearly tumbled over, himself, with the application of a sudden weight in his arms.

Spidey caught him before he fell to the ground and gave him some space to recover his balance and his dignity. Brett found that he was now holding another black backpack, identical to the first one Spidey had tried to hand over to him. This one, however, looked and felt like it weighed a ton. He didn’t know how Spidey had managed to carry it with him up there on the web.

Spidey did not join the scuffle happening in the grass. When asked why not, he whispered simply, “she bites.”

Wade Wilson turned up as nonchalantly as he’d left and, just like he had with Spidey, plucked their thief right out of Daredevil’s grasp. The Devil tensed at first at the sudden intervention, then saw that it was just Wilson and let himself fall limp and dare Brett say it, almost bored. The gal redirected her attention to trying to slash Wilson’s everything.

Wilson let it happen and hummed in appreciation while she did this.

She started to lose confidence in the face of his indifference. Then she appeared to figure out exactly who he was and that she’d been had and she started shrieking and squirming.

Wilson asked Brett and company over his shoulder if they wanted her wet or alive, which Brett didn’t get until Spidey helpfully informed him that Wilson was offering to dunk her in the water to cool her off a bit.

No, no, that wasn’t necessary. Spidey related this information to Wilson in a way which he could understand. Wilson was evidently disappointed, but out of nowhere, he slammed the lady onto her back in the grass and asked her, in no uncertain terms, where they could find the guy she was working for.

To her credit, if Brett had been in her place, he would have fucking talked, too.

Thus subdued, Wilson cheerfully handed her over to Brett and his fellows to be cuffed and taken with her bag to the station.

Brett wasn’t entirely sure how you thank a motley crew of vigilantes, so he followed his heart. Or rather, since his heart was out of ideas, he tried to follow Maynard’s heart. Unfortunately, Maynard’s heart was a Pinterest board and she thought that these fuckheads (and Peter) might appreciate cute little jars of hot chocolate mix.

Ellen’s heart was a little better because she suggested that they ask his good old buddy Nelson what the fuck vigilantes considered objects of thanks.

Nelson stared them dead in the eye and said, “Well, mostly two things: not being arrested or a very specific tennis ball. Although food also works in my experience.”

Nelson would not elaborate on the tennis ball. It couldn’t be just any tennis ball, if they didn’t have _the_ tennis ball, it was going to come across as an insult. He strongly recommended edible goods. Said that Peter in particular had a crazy metabolism that burned through calories like no one’s business.

Brett did not tell his mother that he was baking for Daredevil because she was already Daredevil’s number one fan and she didn’t need to know she had a semi-direct line to the guy now. Instead, he told her he was baking for Spiderman and that was just as big of a mistake because she had opinions on the kid’s height and weight and their effect on the work he was trying to do.

He asked Nelson if he could hand off these goods to the guys the next time he saw them and he said, sure, he would probably see all three that week.

That Friday, he walked into the station and found a little thank you card on his desk. It didn’t have any signatures, but someone had dipped their thumb in a pool of blood and drawn a panda with a huge smile for him.

He let the other relevant detectives see it and then burned the thing as a sanitary violation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brett totally didn't see castle, btw. he was just fucking with matt for his being a dick earlier


	3. take him away boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daredevil’s secret identity was Matt Murdock and all they had to do was prove it.   
> Or so the captain claimed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is SO much ridiculousness to be had here in this little side verse. also any time the universe wants to stop going to shit, i'd be totally grateful

Daredevil’s secret identity was Matt Murdock and all they had to do was prove it.

Or so the captain claimed.

His office felt stuffed full of silence at this information, as the detectives gathered all tried to process it without pointing out all the obvious flaws in the captain’s theory here.

Namely the glaring one that no one dared broach upon fear of swift death.

Brett took a stab at it because his nephew was sick and had played Pepper Pig all fucking night long and he was no longer confident that there was a benevolent God after all.

“Sir, Matt Murdock works a nine to five job, on top of doing charity work for the National Federation of the Blind and Clinton Church. If he was Daredevil in addition to all that, the man would literally never sleep.”

Relief is a tangible thing in an office of high tension.

“Maybe that’s his superpower,” the captain postulated. All the heads which had lifted in hope once again redirected themselves towards their boots.

“We will find out for sure, once we find him. Bring him in.”

Brett had already done his service in the question-asking department. He waited for someone else to take up the call. Ellen lifted her head.

“Sir, on what charges are we supposed to bring him in on? Suspicion of being a vigilante?”

“Did I stutter?”

Ellen stared desperately at Maynard for backup. Maynard pursed her lips and shook her head.

Same, girl. Same.

“Mahoney, bring him in.”

Wait, what?

Matt Murdock was very confused at the three police officers standing outside his door and jerked his face between Brett and his officers and the family of six crowded inside his shoebox office.

“Uh? Detective, I get that you hear this a lot and it probably doesn’t mean anything, but—”

The matriarch of the family started sobbing.

“—Now is the opposite of the best time.”

The grandmother’s grandson tried to comfort her, but it was no use. The lady’s son blinked tears down his cheeks and laid a hand on his mother’s back.

Brett was many things, but he wasn’t cruel.

“We’ll wait,” he said.

Becky, Nelson, Murdock & Page’s office manager, made Brett and his officers sign in. He didn’t know what the fuck to do with that, but the way she told him to do it suggested that there wasn’t actually a decision to be made here. He signed himself and his officers in and they waited in the little waiting area with a collection of highly judgmental clients.

Foggy had already tried to shoo Brett and his guys out of the office, but upon being informed that this wasn’t a joke and that failure to comply would have undesirable consequences, he’d settled for glaring at them furiously through his door. Brett could hear his purposeful typing halfway across the room. Probably submitting a complaint to the department or, hell, the fucking state, as they sat.

Karen had similarly cracked her door. She stared icily and unblinking at Brett in her nest of paperwork like a pissed off barn owl waiting to strike.

Murdock finished up soothing the grandmother and sorting through whatever it was he had to in another half an hour. He emerged, speaking to the family in Spanish, to direct them to Becky’s capable clutches, but was soon caught up in trying to extricate his face from the grandmother’s grateful hands and affection.

Once her family had left the office entirely, he shook himself out and surreptitiously tried to scrub the lipstick off his face with his jacket sleeve. All that he managed to accomplish was smearing it all over his cheek but he seemed to think he’d done a good job, and told Brett that he’d just be a second, he needed to give all the files to Foggy, who had started typing, if possible, even louder and more pointedly.

Brett could not believe they were about to arrest a blind man who was defeated by a distraught _abuelita_ ’s lipstick.

Foggy had the decency to scrub his buddy’s face for him before reminding him to say jack shit.

And with that, they took Matt Murdock into custody.

Matt Murdock was very polite in custody, as he was in most all places except court. He asked Brett if he could know what he was being charged with and Brett decided that he was going to stay as far away from that impending catastrophe as possible.

“My captain, uh, wants to tell you himself,” he told him.

Murdock was understandably baffled by this.

“The…captain?”

Yeah, buddy. And it was only gonna get crazier.

He offered Matt a consolation coffee and Matt accepted on the grounds that he thought he was gonna need it. Brett told him that he wasn’t going to give it to him black for all their sakes.

He delivered the coffee and got one of Matt’s infuriatingly handsome smiles in gratitude and left him to wait for the captain.

Everyone shut the fuck up as the captain strode in, tall and proud, clipboard of interview questions tucked into his armpit. Even the drunk and disorderly and assault case folks recognized that there was something bigger going on here and respected the sudden drop in mood.

The captain opened the door.

The captain closed the door.

Every detective on the floor started praying for Matt Murdock’s soul.

The calm lasted exactly twenty minutes until the slamming of shit in the interview room made everyone in the bull pen leap a foot in the air.

The roaring was muffled, but it wasn’t muffled enough that people couldn’t hear every dulcet tone of aggression and frustration. Matt’s voice didn’t join the captain’s, so evidently he was clinging to his calm the best he could.

You go, Murdock. You hold your ground, honey.

“He’s gonna die,” Maynard muttered out of the corner as her mouth as she passed Brett with a stack of files.

“No, _we’re_ gonna die,” he corrected. The second Fogs got there, it was fucking over.

The interrogation door slammed open hard enough that Brett got the view of a well-panicked Matt pressed all up against the wall. The captain’s face wasn’t quite the same level of freaked, but it was up there.

“You’re gonna sit,” the captain spat at Matt. “And when you’re ready, we’re gonna try again.”

He slammed the door closed.

Matt, surprisingly did not ask for a lawyer. Given that he was a lawyer, this was suspicious, although Brett figured that Fogs would tell him the same things he was telling himself. Brett went in to check on him and offer him a new coffee or a bathroom break—and importantly to make sure he wasn’t dying. Not that anyone had to know.

He seemed okay. Mostly. Pretty ruffled all the way through. Very bewildered.

“Coffee?” Brett asked.

“You think I could get a priest?” Matt replied shakily. “Maybe some last rites?”

“You’re doing great, man. He’s uh. Kinda fixated. But if he gets too out of line, pal, you don’t have to stand for that.” Brett knew that Matt knew this, but he hoped the reminder would help. Matt smiled at him a little bit and asked if he could use the bathroom.

Foggy was menacing half the station with his aura alone by the time Brett came back from a scene.

“Nelson,” he greeted.

“Don’t talk to me, I hate everyone right now.”

Ah. Excellent.

Brett led his 21 year old burglar to his desk and made him sit in the chair before settling in for a good hour’s worth of paperwork.

There was relative peace for a solid five minutes before they heard renewed shouting in the interrogation room. Matt had been in there for what, two? Three hours now?

Brett didn’t understand what the captain was trying to accomplish here. Even if Matt really was Daredevil, they were talking about a guy who would fight with a broken leg if he needed to. Daredevil wouldn’t crack under a few hours of questioning. He might start to get bored, actually. If he was going to crack, it was going to take possibly a nail gun and a vulnerable target, preferably a child, to make that happen.

“Y’all can’t hold him for more than 24,” Foggy grumbled.

They knew, Fogs. They knew. For once, they were all routing for Matt too.

Matt finally asked for Foggy, although Brett got the feeling it was more to cut down on the volume of the discussion than actual legal counsel. Fogs would be a witness to this abuse and would write that shit up in a heartbeat. When he went in, the kid at Brett’s desk dropped his voice and whispered,

“Is the guy in there okay?” Brett looked at the door and thought about it. No shouting from Foggy so far.

“I think he’s fine,” he told the kid.

“MAHONEY.”

Nope.

“GET IN HERE.”

I know the suspect personally, sir. Not a good idea.

“Get. In. Here.”

Matt was bored out of his mind. He was tired of being yelled at. Tired of being asked the same questions over and over. Was pressing his forehead into Foggy’s shoulder when Brett came in. Fogs wasn’t pleased. Brett wasn’t pleased either, but they’d already cycled through the whole team, and Brett was the only one left.

Honestly? He was damn impressed.

Lawyer or not, Matt had survived 8, going on nine hours of questioning by the whole station. Everyone had their own style and you would have thought that by then, someone’s would have worked. Hell, anyone else might have been pushed to make even a false confession at that point.

Matt was a tenacious son of a bitch, Brett would give him that.

“Matt, you need anything before we get started?” he asked.

Matt groaned into Foggy’s shoulder.

“To leave?” he tried.

Sorry, pal.

“Are you familiar with a person called Daredevil?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s a fucking asshole.”

“Oh? How do you know that?”

“He’s the reason I’ve been here for two million years.”

“Have you or anyone in your family ever trained in martial arts?”

“Ugh, Brett, why?”

“I’ve got to ask, man.”

“Uuuuuugh. Dad. Boxer. Me. Age two to nine. Boxing.”

“Anything after that?”

“Blind.”

“Is that a no?”

“The hell do you think?”

“I can’t write down ‘the hell do you think,’ Matt. You know this.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“What are your feelings on the police? Do you think they do a good job?”

“Right here? Right now?”

“Matt.” Ah. The counselor now counsels his counselor.

“Uugh. Yeah. They’re fine, most of the time they’re fine. Except when they accuse my clients without grounds.”

“How about other people? Do you think they do a good job protecting other people? Do you think your neighborhood is safe?”

“No.”

“Explain.”

“Dogs.”

Um?

“He’s got a thing with dogs,” Foggy explained in exhaustion.

“Care to elaborate?” Brett nudged.

“No.”

“Matt, do you know what parkour is?”

“I’m dying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase the question. Have you ever done parkour?”

“Brett. Brett, I cannot. I literally cannot do that.”

“Parkour?”

“Can you get an ophthalmologist in here?”

“Sorry? A—”

“An eye doctor. So that they can shine their lights and do whatever is it they do and just tell you all that I am so. Fucking. Blind.”

“So you can’t do parkour?”

“Well, right now, I’m willing to throw myself off a building to prove it, if that helps?”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“I tried, sir,” Brett said with a shrug and his arms full of clipboard. The captain rested his head on clenched fists on his desk.

“I know it’s him,” he muttered. “I _know_ it. Get an ophthalmologist.”

What.

“You heard me.”

At 10 at night?

“Mahoney, I’m not in a joking mood right now.”

Well, fine. It’s your funeral.

Dr. Mendez was awake only by the grace of God and she was only willing to come down to the station because she wanted to meet Daredevil. She went into the interview room with Matt and was in there with a flashlight and a handful of other shit for five minutes.

Just five.

The captain knew what that meant. Everyone knew what that meant.

They started to very, very quietly build barricades out of the shit on their desks.

“Dude, I’m surprised he has eyes still, the amount of damage he’s rockin’ in there. I mean, whatever got into them, man. It must have hurt like hell. I’m surprised he doesn’t have more facial scarring,” Dr. Mendez said.

Dr. Mendez was a little off-duty and a little sleep-deprived and her professionalism and human empathy might have taken a brief vacation. But they got the gist of it.

The captain sighed and pressed fingers into his own eyes. They all ducked down into their make-shift fortress, preparing for the explosion.

“One more time,” he said instead.

“Matthew Murdock. Are you the vigilante known to us as Daredevil?”

“No.”

“Are you the vigilante known as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen?”

“No.”

“Are you the vigilante known as the Man in the Mask?”

“Noooo.”

“Are you the vigilante known to some as just ‘Red?’”

“Jesus Christ, how many names does this fucker have?”

“I’d remind you to watch your language, here, I’ll ask again—”

“NO.”

Matt told them that they could keep him all 24 hours, but he wasn’t going to change his answers, and to his credit, the only way they’d changed over the last 16 was that they got increasingly more profane.

“How the fuck is he doing it?” The captain, who really, _really_ needed a nap, mumbled to himself. He’d been pacing his office for the last half an hour, and the new shift of detectives were watching in silence, just as Brett and company had briefed them to. They were all getting off very soon and none of them were going to jeopardize another night of sleep by someone putting some new, dumbass idea into the guy’s head.

“How is he doing it?”

“Sir,” Brett said after far too many minutes of this, “He’s doing it by not lying. He isn’t Daredevil. He’s exactly who he says he is. He can’t do parkour. He can’t fight crime. He can’t do anything that Daredevil does. The only thing that connects them is Fogs.”

The captain snapped his head up so fast he almost cracked his neck.

“So, Franklin Nelson is Daredevil?” he breathed.

Silence.

If you laugh, you will get your ass beat.

If you laugh, you will get your ass beat.

If you—

Brett came into the station to serve his punishment of filing evidence just as Matt hit his 24 hours. He kind of stumbled out of the interrogation room and asked Fogs blearily if they had court today, was it today? What was today?

Fogs didn’t have an answer for him because he didn’t know anymore.

They needed a nap, both of them. They were probably going to go off somewhere and be sickening and take a nap together.

On the way out the door, Matt paused and reached over to gently wrap a hand around Brett’s wrist.

“Thank you, detective,” he said. “It’s good to know someone believes in me sometimes.”

And away he and Fogs went. Off to terrorize the world once again.

It was only when he got to the evidence locker that he realized that Matt had been in the interrogation room when he’d said all that shit in the office.


	4. sniffer dogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Please tell me Captain America isn’t missing,” Brett begged. He did not have the time or the resources to track down Captain America. His nephew might die if he had to track down Captain America. He really would die if Brett couldn’t find him.
> 
> Sam sighed and rubbed at his face. 
> 
> “I wish that was my only goddamn idiot,” he finally said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone called matt dog-like in the comments and i fucking went for it yo

Sam Wilson, _that_ Sam Wilson was waiting for Brett when he came in on Tuesday and Maynard and Ellen stared at him like sharks.

He did not need to meet Sam Wilson that badly.

That said, his nephew _would_ lose his goddamn mind. And Brett _might_ be able to steal back the “coolest uncle” title from his brother-in-law.

Might.

The question was: was it worth the blood?

He didn’t have a chance to give that question the focus it deserved because Sam Wilson was suddenly standing up and moving towards him, despite Maynard’s obvious mental commands for him to sit right the fuck back down.

“Detective Mahoney?” Sam Wilson asked.

“Yes, Mr.--uh, Tech Sergeant--?” He tried. Sam Wilson smiled.

“Let’s go ahead and skip that,” he said amiably, “Turns out rank doesn’t matter when you’re chasing an idiot. The guys in Brooklyn said that you’re the point person on these kind of things.”

On--?

Oh, _no._

“Please tell me Captain America isn’t missing,” Brett begged. He did not have the time or the resources to track down Captain America. His nephew might die if he had to track down Captain America. He really would die if Brett couldn’t find him.

Sam sighed and rubbed at his face.

“I wish that was my only goddamn idiot,” he finally said.

It wasn’t?

“He’s not _missing_ ,” Captain America hissed at Brett and his officers from the staircase. He refused to enter the room properly. He seemed more than happy to squint at them from behind the enormous houseplant framing the stairs. All Brett could see of him was one blue eye and the bottom of his jeans. It had taken Sam Wilson an inordinate amount of time to drag him even that close to them.

Brett found himself slapped with a flashback to Spidey telling the captain that Captain America didn’t trust cops for love or money. He hadn’t realized quite the extent of that animosity.

“Steve,” Wilson said, pressing his fingers into his temples, “He’s been gone a week.”

“So? He used to do that all the time.”

“Yeah, when y’all didn’t have phon—what the fuck do you mean he did that all the time? He just? Up and gone? For a _week_ , Steven? And you didn’t do anything?”

The one eye Brett could see squinted harder at them. How could one man contain that much suspicion? It was almost impressive.

“He always comes home. He’ll come home this time, too.”

Wilson sighed.

“Baby, just—just come here, alright? Ten minutes, no being weird for ten minutes, and then you can have as many delusions as you want.”

It was a fucking trip to hear someone called Captain America ‘baby,’ but it was also kind of sweet. Especially since Cap was evidently unable to refuse such sweet-nothings. He edged out and proved himself half as threatening in a huge black sweatshirt and jeans. He smelled of cigarettes when he passed by to perch as little of his ass-cheek as humanly possible on the arm of the couch Wilson was occupying and Brett was confused.

As far as he knew, Cap didn’t smoke. Maybe it was a way to gain some rapport here.

“Wouldn’t have picked you out for a smoking habit, Captain,” he noted evenly.

“Still a free fucking country, ain’t it?”

O-kay, so let’s just trash that one and start over.

Wilson wrapped an entirely indiscreet arm around Cap’s waist and gave him a none-so-gentle squeeze as if to say “I will murder you as soon as these nice men leave if you don’t behave,” but Cap remained as tense as ever. Damn. Okay, how the fuck do you build rapport with a 100 year-old white guy?

He surveyed the house. One of these guys was trying to fill all the available wall space with foliage. There were vines snaking their merry way across the top of the walls, and someone had lovingly suspended little pots of soil in a few places so that they might have a place to put down some roots.

“Y’all into plants?” he asked. Wilson hummed.

“JB’ll bleach all your clothes if you so much as touch ‘em. They’re his children,” he said.

Cap did not stop glaring at Brett and his team. Brett could practically feel the other two squirming in discomfort. Man knew exactly what he was doing.

Brett decided that he wasn’t going to play that game.

“What’ve you got against cops, big guy?” he asked Steve. Think of him as Steve. He’s just a witness that way.

Steve said nothing. He didn’t want to chat. He wasn’t half as friendly as he pretended to be on TV.

“They tried to deport his mama, on uh, multiple occasions,” Sam explained patiently.

Ah.

Yeah, that would fucking do it.

“Gotten any better since then?” he asked, looking Steve directly in the eye.

Steve pursed his lips and shook his head back and forth, slowly, purposefully.

Well, fuck, alright. Rapport, what rapport? We don’t need rapport.

“When was the last time you saw Sergeant Barnes?” he asked.

“8 days ago, he went to work at something like 7:30, didn’t come back that afternoon,” Sam Wilson explained.

“He always come back?”

“Always. If he’s planning to be gone for more than a few days, he leaves a note.”

“Where does he work?”

“Couple places. There’s a shelter on—Steven, get your ass back here.”

Steve was done. He wasn’t having it, Brett could see it all over his everything.

“It’s alright,” he said, as the guy trekked up the stairs, “Let him go. We can talk later if we need to.”

Sam Wilson was pained by this, he looked after his guy and rubbed at his jaw.

“I’m sorry, he’s not usually so stubborn about this kind of thing. I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

Huh. Interesting. Brett made a note of it.

“He doesn’t know where Sergeant Barnes is?”

“No,” Wilson sighed. He rubbed a hand over the outside of his thigh.

“That’s unusual?” Brett prodded.

Sam Wilson cocked his head, thinking to himself. Brett hadn’t realized it was a complicated question, but what the fuck did he know about superhero relationships.

“I guess it’s not that unusual. The length of time and lack of notification is mostly the issue here. Buck goes out a lot, especially at night. He’s got kind of a weird sleep schedule; he’ll go down at around four and get up at midnight and go out for a while.”

“Does Cap sleep with him?”

“No, not at four anyways. Steve’s about 2% less weird and sleeps like a normal person. JB’ll usually leave a note before he goes out so we usually have a vague idea where he’s gone.”

“Can I see the notes?”

The notes were in code, that’s the only way Brett could describe it. Barnes’s handwriting was the kind of loopy, early century shit that Brett hadn’t realized he despised until just now. And even when that layer of code was overcome, they said shit like “bread” and “pier” and “labels.” All just one-word suggestions.

Brett wondered if all spies transferred this level of cryptic messaging to their everyday lives or if Barnes was just permanently stuck in it.

He asked Wilson if he could see other parts of the house to see if Barnes had left any signs or reasons for his disappearance or if he had willfully disappeared. Chances were that if there were no signs of foul play, they’d have to just let the guy come back when he was going to come back. Wilson accepted this explanation and welcomed him to look wherever he wanted, but he also told him without batting an eye that he was going to need a lockpick or a saw to get into the guy’s room.

Comforting.

There was literally no reason to have that many deadbolts on his damn door, didn’t matter how paranoid you were. If the first six ain’t gonna do the job you need them to, the next 4 ain’t either.

And it wasn’t like there was even anything to hide, really. Barnes apparently didn’t do too much of his sleeping in the room, given that he allegedly needed to lay all over every inch of the bed and the floor in the shared bedroom in order to catch some ‘z’s.

There was a collection of sci-fi novels which were more post-it note than novel in one corner and a long table covered in precious seedlings across the window. The upside was that the plants really helped counteract the stench of a pack-a-day habit. Barnes had three ashtrays in his room and two had been emptied.

It dawned on Brett that Cap wasn’t a smoker himself, he’d just stolen one of his boo’s sweatshirts to make himself feel better.

It was kind of cute.

A little.

Okay, maybe a lot. The guy was worried sick and scared and, in his experience, cops weren’t exactly the good guys in this situation. Brett could understand that.

It was slightly strange house to be in, he couldn’t help but think. No TVs anywhere. No laptops out in view. Barnes had a pad of paper by his primary ashtray and his plants which was filled with more indecipherable loopy notes.

“Can you read any of this?” he asked Wilson. He shrugged hard.

“I can’t read anything JB writes, Steve’s the only one who can.”

Steve’s door closed abruptly across the hall.

Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s about what he figured.

“He’s really not about us,” he muttered quietly. Wilson was apologetic. It wasn’t really his fault, though, and Brett told him so.

“Alright, let’s take a couple pictures and we’ll get the paperwork sorted and let you know what the next steps are, that fair?” he said.

It was fair.

Fogs was falling asleep with his head smashed up against the wall adjacent to the courtroom door.

He was vulnerable.

He knew better than that.

It wasn’t Brett’s fault, he had to be punished.

One dead arm later, he remembered that Fogs was Barnes’s lawyer for most things.

“You heard your client’s up and disappeared?” he asked.

Foggy’s brain took a second to determine which missing client he was talking about.

“Ah. Yeah, JB,” he said. “He does that sometimes. Usually comes back within three or four days, though.”

Brett leaned against the wall with him.

“We’re looking at nine, going on ten. Cap’s not being very compliant with the investigation.”

“I’m not surprised. He plays nice for the cameras, but that grudge runs deep, man.”

“I take it Barnes ain’t hot on us either.”

Foggy hummed.

“You filing him as a missing person?” he asked.

“I don’t think we can. Not really enough to go on. Does seem kind of suspicious, though. Guy just vanishes out of the blue. Might be nothing. But he also might be having some kind of episode or something; we wouldn’t want him out in the cold doing that.”

Foggy pursed his lips and digested this for a moment.

“Got anything of his?” he asked.

What.

“You heard me.”

Well, yeah.

“Cool. Ask Daredevil to find him. Or have Sam do it.”

Sam Wilson stared at him in supreme suspicion when he asked if he would be alright with Brett taking a slightly unconventional approach to this case.

“What’s unconventional mean?” Wilson asked in the tone of a man who had been burned before.

“Well, there’s no easy way to say this,” he said.

“Jesus fuck, not you again,” Wilson groaned as Daredevil leaned dangerously far out over them on a fire-escape.

Guy was grinning like it was Christmas.

“Awww,” he said sweetly, “And here I missed you.”

Wilson could not bear to look at that smirk. Brett empathized with his entire heart. He, too, would sleep better if Daredevil vanished permanently from the face of the earth.

DD was at least willing to give it a shot, although he clarified that he might not be as good at tracking outside of Hell’s Kitchen. He wouldn’t say why, but not two minutes after sending the guy off into Brooklyn, Brett watched as he literally clotheslined himself and learned a hard and fast lesson about gravity.

At first, Brett thought it was a fluke, and Wilson did too, but ten minutes later saw Wilson throwing himself into an alley to catch the man after a fumbled hold. Double D was startled to be caught, safe and sound in Sam Wilson’s arms, but once he’d recovered from the shock, he startled squirming like Sam’s grip burned him.

Wilson dropped him with a cocked eyebrow, and he threw himself up and dusted himself off and scampered up and away from them, as high as possible.

Anyone else would have swooned if Sam Wilson had caught them like that. Brett would have fucking swooned. That was movie shit.

But DD?

No, not interested. Masculinity vastly more important. Must retain dumbass, holier-than-thou reputation.

Unbelievable.

The thing about having DD track someone was that he was fucking nuts about it. He had zero boundaries and no discernable method, although, apparently, judging by the way he was practically huffing the sweatshirt Wilson had offered him, he had an insane sense of smell.

He was like a human sniffer dog. A couple whiffs of the sweatshirt and he was off like a rocket. The first thing he did was break into poor Cap’s window and scare the shit out of him. By the time Brett and Wilson made it upstairs, back in the house, Steve had flattened himself against the open door and was observing Double D squirming himself into the closet like he needed a quick dip back into the shadows before he could do anything productive.

Steve was understandably freaked right the fuck out and had a furiously whispered conversation with Wilson about just how fucking invasive and unnecessary this shit was when Daredevil burst back out of the closet to scramble out onto the fire-escape and sniff around again. And then he was off, crashing down into the space between the brownstones and leaping over a backwall.

They all shared a dumbstruck moment of quiet.

And then Cap went rocketing right after the fucker. Jumped right out the window and everything.

Wilson considered this with unsettling thoughtfulness.

“Well, that’s one way to get a guy invested,” he said.

What.

They found Cap before they found Daredevil. Found him panting with his hands on his knees outside a bodega.

Wilson was even more interested in this development.

“Met your match, there, buddy?” he asked. Steve stared at him in shock and concern and threw out a few vague gestures in what must have been the general direction Daredevil had run off in.

“’S fucking fast,” Steve breathed. “I mean, like. I can do the flats, but the ups and downs—”

He startled backwards because DD had returned to steal back the sweater from Sam’s arms for another good sniff. He snapped his head up and around. Brett tamped down on the urge to ask “watcha hear, boy?”

Then Double D re-noticed Steve and got all up in his space to sniff him, too.

Weird?

Absolutely.

Brett wondered how the fuck the guy was doing this shit. Maybe he was faking it? Like, maybe he saw this whole thing as a joke and was just yanking their chain.

“Man, I appreciate that you are letting the whole freak flag fly today,” he said, “I really do, but can you maybe give us a hint of what exactly the hell you’re doing?”

Daredevil wasn’t paying attention to him, though. He was deeply invested in something Southwest of them. He cocked his head several different ways and then readdressed the three of their dumbstruck expressions before gesturing.

“Something over there,” he explained, taking Brett’s request in the completely wrong way.

He was off before he could be corrected, however, and Steve shook himself out and bounced off after him, refreshed from his short break. Sam watched them both go in amusement now.

“You know, I might actually keep him if he can tire Steve out,” he told Brett. “Think Nelson’ll lend him to me twice a week?”

What the fuck did Fogs have to do with any of this?

So, the way to find a superspy and ruin a secret spy operation was to throw an overexcited Devil at it, Brett now knew. Brett was now filing that shit away for the next drug ring he had to bust.

Barnes was six types of confused at the weird-ass burglar trying to get at his preppy sweater. He was evidently undercover, wearing huge chunky glasses and several fake piercings and he shoved Daredevil away, hissing at him to cut that shit out.

Daredevil hissed back and shoved right back at him until Barnes threw in the towel and threw up his arms to let him have whatever the fuck it was he wanted. He did not expect that to be for the guy to sniff at the armpits and neck of his sweater. Although, to be fair, no one could have expected that.

By the time Barnes looked up in their direction, he was just a little too late, and ended with his arms full of Cap and his back full of gravel. DD was a little shocked that his chewtoy had so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, but he rapidly lost interest and waited patiently for Brett and Wilson to catch up to the two on the ground.

When Brett got closer, he saw that what he thought had been slightly desperate hugging was, in fact, Cap threatening to suffocate Barnes with his bare fucking hands if he ever pulled this stunt ever again. He’d graduated to growling at Barnes in some other language by the time Wilson got in there to separate the two of them.

DD was pleased at a job well done.

Brett kind of felt like he needed to reward him.

He did not know how to reward him. Food had been good last time, so maybe something sweet?

Sam Wilson, however, lived with every type of crazy under the sun, and seemed to know exactly how to reward this unusually helpful behavior.

“You want caffeine, liquor, or an IOU?” he asked the guy. DD perked up real quick and Brett filed that shit away, too. He needed a notebook or something.

DD wanted caffeine.

Brett could not say he’d seen that one coming. He personally did not think the guy needed any more caffeine, what with how awake he was already. Wilson told him that he could have any coffee he wanted, honey. He said they had a few bags at home that were kind of fancy if he wanted to have a sniff.

He did. Obviously.

The newly recovered and begrudgingly apologetic JB watched this guy huff through all the shit in their cabinet in awe.

“I could use you,” he thought out loud. Wilson sent him such a fucking stormy look that Brett shuddered.

“You will _not_ ,” he ordered.

DD was, again, not interested. He asked Wilson if he could have half a pound of some obscure coffee from Ethiopia and both Barnes and Steve hummed as if they approved of this choice. Despite Wilson’s best efforts, Daredevil would not take the whole bag. He wanted a half a pound. That was all.

Wilson foisted the rest of the bag off on Brett.

Brett was not going to let Daredevil take the subway back to Hell’s Kitchen. It was his civic duty to spare everyone on that carriage the awkwardness of that ride. He wrangled the guy into his car and left him to break every road safety law in the backseat, all curled up around his bag of joe.

He released the demon back into the wild at the corner dividing Hell’s Kitchen’s from the Upper West Side and didn’t even get to say thanks before the guy was out and off in the wind once again.

He shook his head and went back to work to close Barnes’s half-finished missing person case.

The coffee was unfairly good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cannot be stopped but i must be stopped its too easy to write for this verse  
> ITS TROUBLE


	5. that's karma, son

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brett had started a notebook. A notebook which his goddamn nephew had already dug out of his bag and drawn all over in crayon. But a notebook no less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TROUBLE I SAY

Brett had started a notebook. A notebook which his goddamn nephew had already dug out of his bag and drawn all over in crayon. But a notebook no less.

In it, he’d started keeping track of all the weird shit he was learning through his ever increasing exposure to the underbelly of the New York crime scene.

Daredevil’s overwhelming fondness for coffee had made it in there. So had Brett’s recent discovery that Spidey could be persuaded into doing some worryingly complex chemical tests if provided with a large enough vessel of resin.

Stark did not allow the boy to have resin. Brett thought that there was maybe a good reason for that, but it wasn’t his job to enforce lab safety. It was his job to catch serial rapists.

Jessica Jones, he’d also learned, would be two thousand percent more likely to cooperate with officers if she was not awoken before noon. Luke Cage, similarly, worked a night job and appreciated not having some asshole pounding down his door before 10am.

There were, in fact, _two_ Hawkeyes and yes, they were _both_ called Hawkeye and no, you should not even bother questioning that. Also, one of those Hawkeyes was deaf, but Fogs wouldn’t tell him which one, he said he’d figure it out on his own.

Brett had come to learn that Frank Castle was the human equivalent of Gollum and he could be coaxed forth from one of his many caves only through Karen Page.

Only.

Unless. You were _extremely_ desperate, in which case you might be able to call Daredevil and alert him of the man’s presence in the city. DD would find the guy. You just had to be prepared to lay on him before he could pick a fight and ruin everyone’s day.

If you were desperately desperate too, Brett had learned, you could find Deadpool through Spidey. Little Peter seemed to know where he was at all times, even though he claimed he didn’t. In order to extract this information from Peter, however, you needed to present your case very, very thoroughly. If you didn’t make it exceedingly clear that this was beyond Spiderman’s abilities or that it involved something especially Peter-repellent, then Peter would lie to your face about contacting Deadpool and would meet you at your arranged place himself.

Brett had very few notes on how to work with Deadpool.

Mostly because reliability and logic didn’t seem to be his strong suit. He did things because he wanted to and he didn’t do them when he didn’t. It depended on the day. It depended on how he was feeling. It depended on who he’d just spent the last 72 hours with.

If it was the X-men, you weren’t going to find him. He wasn’t going to entertain anything you said.

If it was what he called his A-Team, there was absolutely no telling whether he’d be amenable to lending support or not.

If it was Team Red, as they called himself, the combination of DD and Spidey making pathetic “but _Wade_ ” sounds at him seemed to appeal to his ever wandering better nature.

The captain decided that he was pleased with all of Brett’s progress except on the Deadpool front and assigned him the task of collecting better intel.

Brett informed him that that was fine, but that it didn’t matter how hard the captain wished it, some of these guys weren’t going to give up their secrets or cooperate. They just weren’t. They weren’t interested in justice. They weren’t interested in the system as it was. They hated the police for a thousand different reasons. And many of them were simply not going to do it because they didn’t want to.

It was as easy as that.

Deadpool was one of those guys. He ran in an entirely different world from most of the other guys and he was very, very happy with that, and he was ambivalent at best at above-ground crime and justice.

The captain thought that the recent breakthrough in getting vigilantes to pitch in a little towards more legitimate crime-solving would sway Deadpool on this issue. He said that he believed there was some good in the guy and that if he was any decent kind of person, he’d want to help out.

Yeah, Brett though, maybe if one of his buddies is the target. But otherwise, no pal. You’re barking up the least productive tree in the goddamn forest.

The captain informed him that he was not an expert in this area and told him to provide one or follow orders.

Huh. Now there’s a thought.

Brett, as the up-and-coming vigilante-whisperer of his force (he fucking hated this title and hated that everyone had decided that he was the one for this shitty fucking job—you get two vigilantes to talk to you and all of the sudden you’re the fucking point person for all the goddamn underground folks in the city), found himself in the unique position of reporting on Foggy’s relationship with one Matthew Murdock in exchange for Anna Nelson’s seemingly unfailing ability to make Foggy talk to him about this shit.

Fogs was displeased.

So.

So.

Displeased.

Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, pal?

This put Brett in a very good position to knock on Foggy’s door and be let in, which he did. Because he legitimately needed to shift this burden from his shoulders.

Fogs opened the door and said that Brett could come in on the condition he helped him with something.

Brett did not like the sound of something.

He was correct.

“Dude, it’s infected,” he pronounced.

“You shut your whore mouth,” Foggy snapped back.

Fogs had spent half of their teenage years begging his mom to let him get an industrial piercing. She’d allowed the ear piercings and had even let him test the waters with a single lip piercing, but she drew the line at the industrial. She could get the rings, but she could not understand why he wanted a bar stamped through his ear as well.

Something about law school—likely an in-depth, highly personalized conversation about professionalism—had made all the metal Fogs had once delighted in terrifying their classmates with fall out of his face. He’d come home to pick up some books three weeks into attending Columbia and Brett, in passing, had nearly punched him in the jaw, having mistaken him as someone trying to break into the Nelson’s family home.

It had taken him ages to see past Foggy’s lip piercing as a kid and now he was still blown away when it wasn’t there.

Fogs claimed that him being a partner at Nelson, Murdock & Page meant that he got to write his own damn dress code for once and his damn dress code included hair to your toes and goddamn industrial piercings.

Hence the present situation.

“It’s probably your fucking hair that did it,” Brett thought out loud. Mostly just to see the scandalized look on Fog’s face.

It would never not be gratifying.

“I need saline,” Foggy decided miserably after bestowing this gift upon Brett. “Do I have saline?”

Fogs did indeed have saline in his absurd first aid kit. Seriously, there was no reason for this much gauze.

Whatever. It didn’t matter.

He commenced attempting to convince Fogs that the best way to soak his ear was to put his ear in a dish of saline rather than just dropping the saline onto the skin, so that he’d douse his face when Brett asked him what he needed to.

Foggy stared at him in disgust and then called his nurse friend to verify this information.

Goddamnit.

“Are there vigilante experts?” he finally asked Foggy and the towel-wrapped ice cube he was holding to his ear.

Fogs shrugged.

“I mean, it’s probably a field of study by this point,” he said. He moved the ice cube to the other hole.

“How do you know all this shit about these people then?”

Foggy shrugged again.

“I just talk to them, man. They come to me, enter my life, and refuse to leave it. Like herpes, I’m telling you. Honestly? I think we’re all friends at this point.”

Huh.

Okay.

Wait.

“You’re friends with the Punisher? That guy ruined your career.”

Foggy scoffed.

“He also fixed the fault in the office and keeps the shitheads from our door, so, you know. I dunno if I’d go as far as friends for me and him. But he’s Karen’s friend, so what can I do?”

Not fucking be friends.

This was not talk Foggy understood. He waved it off like it didn’t mean anything and returned to the earlier topic thoughtfully.

“I wonder how’d they’d study them, these experts,” he hummed, “Like, obviously a survey ain’t gonna do the trick here. So what, interviews? Let’s sit down the Spiderman and the Punisher and see what they think about life?”

Yeah, it sounded pretty nuts now that he thought about it.

“Hey, google it,” Fogs encouraged him. His ear only looked redder from the ice and the infection. Brett got out his phone and took a picture of it to send to Mrs. Nelson before complying over Foggy’s vocal irritation.

Google said that a joint team of scholars at CUNY and Columbia were actually trying to study NYC’s unusually large and active vigilante population as they spoke.

Their website was fucking wild.

They had a counter of “encounters” which documented the exact issue he and Fogs had been throwing around earlier.

“Subject amenable to foodstuffs but not paperwork,” one student had logged in this box. “Accepted foodstuffs but then claimed that could not write with hands full. Researcher feels ‘duped.’”

“Subject agreed to speak, but only about _The Shining_ ,” wrote another poor soul.

“Subject appears to have hearing impairment. Repeatedly asked researcher to “sing us a song Mr. Piano Man.”

Brett and Foggy were dying by the end of it.

They were trying so hard.

“Maybe we should throw them a bone,” Foggy said.

Yeah, maybe they should.

Brett sent the group an email saying that he and his lawyer compatriot were currently working on cases which involved vigilantes and were interested in the research being done in the city. They were willing to provide some interviews of their experiences in exchange for being alerted of any significant findings.

Brett got an email back almost one hour later.

It was painfully formal and had obviously been written by a group of folks crowded around a computer bursting with anxiety and shifting commas like their lives depended on it.

He messaged Fogs about this develop and got back a “that was fast.”

They agreed to speak with the students the following week.

Four professors, two post-docs, and a bevy of grad students were _dying_ to talk to him and Fogs that following Friday.

As soon as Foggy entered the room, they were freaking out, telling him how valuable his court cases had been to their research.

He was surprised. It took him a little while to remember all the shit in the public record that had his name on it.

Brett stayed out of this shit because he was still new to the game.

They gave what they thought were fair evaluations and answers to the questions posed.

Some of the stuff was pretty fucking weird and esoteric.

“Has Daredevil ever exposed any religious leanings to you?” they asked. Foggy hummed and hawed and finally said,

“Well, he’s told me once that he believed himself to be possessed by a demon in the past.”

And one of the students clutched her heart, apparently unspeakably relieved that her analysis was still valid.

“Spiderman appears to be very lean, do you think there might be the possibility of an eating disorder there? Maybe some control issues? Has anything he’s ever done led you to believe either of those things might be true?” they asked Brett.

No. Pete would eat anything handed to him, provided it did not contain cilantro or celery. Brett had found this knowledge more useful than it had any right to be.

“No, I have bribed him with every food under the sun and he’s been more than happy to wolf it down,” he explained to furious note-taking. “Pretty sure he’s just like that because of his mutation. If you really want his attention, I recommend calorie-dense things. Ice cream. Hamburgers. That kind of thing.”

They asked Fogs if the Punisher had ever expressed any remorse for his actions and Foggy was so taken aback by the question, it took him several times to get out an answer.

“Frank is not a bad person,” he finally said. “He’s not a psychopath. He’s got a lot of trauma and he’s able to compartmentalize things which he does and things with happen to him better than the average person, maybe, but he’s not a monster. He doesn’t manipulate people or anything like that, and if you’re one of his people, he’ll do anything for you. I know it’s hard to reconcile that with that he’s done, but. He’s just. That’s just who he is.”

And so on and so on.

They were informed that this information, bizarre as it seemed, would be indescribably helpful to the study and that the two of them would be alerted of any findings as soon as possible.

They thanked the group and were thanked in return and left.

Six weeks later saw the captain trying to understand why the fuck Deadpool had graffitied a massive, purple cock and balls on their station window (Brett knew exactly why and it had to do with the new detective Goldberg trying and failing to arrest Wilson spectacularly the night previous. His hubris was now being rewarded by antagonism. He’d learn.), when Brett got an email from the research group followed by a text from Foggy.

 **FN** : k, I know what your thinking

 **FN:** but fogs you jut got a piercing

 **FN:** but consider, brett, how much improved my sex life would be with another tongue piercing

He had not, nor ever intended to consider this. He informed Fogs of this and received a frowny face.

 **FN:** okay but srs question you think Matt would freak?

 **FN:** I miss it brett

 **FN:** I miss it so much I never told him I had one and i’m scared he’s gotta tap out

 **FN:** BRETT I’M IN CRISIS WHAT IF HE DOESN’T LIKE IT

Okay, this sounded like a drink conversation.

They determined over several beers and a few shots that Matt was the same guy who’d fucked his merry way through half the grad students at Columbia and at least a quarter of his undergrad department and so was probably into all kinds of kinky shit. Probably.

Brett honestly could not imagine Murdock as a kinky guy, but Fogs was concerned, so he went along with it for his peace of mind.

“It’s a piercing, Fogs,” he slurred, “Not BDSM. Oh. Also those students got back to us. Said that they’ve ‘employed some of the suggested techniques and found them far more fruitful.’ They wanted to say thanks again.”

“Wait ‘til they try to talk to Wade,” Foggy giggled.

“Dude, he went for like, veins and everything on the window.”

Fogs did not choke on his drink, but it was a near thing.

Maynard was judging him for all the cups of coffee on his desk and accusing him of colluding with the enemy when the captain came out and demanded that Brett tell him everything he knew about Wade Wilson.

Brett stared at him and opened his once gray, now tie-dye notebook (courtesy of Amos, thank you so much, honey. Uncle Brett _loves_ rainbow) to read off his limited information on Deadpool. It had not changed since the last time the captain demanded this information.

“Call Spidey in then,” Captain griped.

A thud and a squeak attracted their attention and they looked up to see Wade Wilson himself reapplying an enormous, pink, inelegant dick to the window which the captain had personally power-washed the day before.

He froze upon noticing everyone in the office staring directly at him through the window and then flattened himself onto it to make an even lewder demonstration of himself.

Brett addressed the captain.

“You really want to work with _that_ , sir?”

No?

Yeah, that’s what he fucking thought.

No amount of expert opinion or applied theory was going to crack that one.


	6. just get it over with already

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He left the building without his cane.

It was Brett’s understanding that there was a conflict brewing in and among certain Teams of a certain color and that the interloper, according to Foggy, was the suggestion of a costume change.

Brett could not imagine anything he cared about less in his entire life.

Foggy had opinions on it, however, and they were currently locked in a stalemate because Fogs had snapped a photo of the state of Brett’s desk at the station and had threatened to send it to his mom if Brett sent Mrs. Nelson the picture of Foggy’s industrial piercing. This meant that Brett was gonna hear this shit whether he wanted to or not.

“Pete’s thinking about making a black suit, and Double D’s already switched to a black suit, and I think Wade’s going to have a breakdown.”

“The hell does the kid need a black suit for?”

“Stealth, so he claims.”

“Dude.”

Fogs shrugged hard.

“Rumor has it Stark has him training with the Black Widow.”

“Nah.”

“It’s true.”

“Nahhhh.”

Brett checked his phone to make sure none of his coworkers were messaging him. Foggy pouted and flicked the flat of his nail against the side of his glass. He’d been weird these last couple weeks, Fogs. Brett was suspicious. Suspicious in all the ways his relationship with his sister had taught him to be.

According to _his_ Spidey Sense, Fogs was either gonna drop an “I’m pregnant” or throw a shoe at him in the imminent future.

Hey, he never claimed that his Spidey Sense was as good as the kid’s.

“Brett, can I tell you something?”

See? _See???_

Not as good, but pretty damn close.

“Sure.”

Foggy snagged Brett’s beer, ignoring his yelp over this, and squinted at him hard.

“Swear you’re not going to judge me.”

Psh.

As if there was anything left to judge the guy about. Brett already knew every embarrassing moment he’d ever had. He’d been there, suffering through the secondhand embarrassment with his hands slapped up against his jaw in anguish.

“Brett.”

“Okay, okay. I swear.”

“I mean it.”

He chuffed.

“Man, there is nothing you can tell me at this point which is crazier than the life I’m already out here livin’.”

Silence.

Extreme squinting. Brett restrained himself from squinting back. That would just be rude.

“Nevermind.”

What.

What the hell?

“Hey, I’ve got an early morning, I’m taking off,” Fogs said, pushing Brett’s beer back to him and standing up. He rummaged around for his bag.

Wait. No. What just happened?

“Hey, wait, wait, wait,” he called after Foggy. He didn’t turn around. Brett threw down a tip and tossed the strap of his own bag over his shoulder to follow Foggy out the doors.

He had to jog a little to catch up with the guy. It was cold and their breath made clouds. He fell into step next to Foggy and nudged him a bit with his shoulder.

“C’mon, man, don’t be like that. What’s up? You can tell me.”

“Leave it, man,” Foggy told him, edging out of the proximity a little.

It was so unlike him. Like, yeah. He and Brett had this little feud thing going on, but they both knew that that wasn’t the whole of their relationship. There was a reason why he’d stuck by this weird kid through all of elementary and middle and—fuck basically their entire education. Maybe Fogs had gone off to law school for a bit and yeah, maybe Brett had gone to the academy and okay, so technically they were on opposite sides of the courtroom or whatever.

But Fogs was still Fogs and Brett was still Brett, and he’d do anything for the guy. Had Foggy forgotten that?

He didn’t say anything for a block or two and let Foggy have his space. He wasn’t quite sure where they were going because it wasn’t in the direction of either of their apartments.

The tension got a little too much for off-duty Brett to handle. He caught Foggy’s arm and Fogs pulled a little bit against it but seemed to have already resigned himself to having this interaction.

It was kind of a relief. They could drop the masks for a second in the cold.

“What is it?” Brett asked.

“I can’t tell you,” Foggy said, not looking at him.

“Can’t or don’t want to.”

“Can’t.”

“Client?”

“No.”

“Fogs—”

“I just can’t Brett, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Ouch.

It shouldn’t have stung, but it did. He let go of Foggy’s arm.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Foggy sighed. “I’m gonna to talk to a friend of mine, sorry to leave you here, man.”

That just wasn’t right.

Something here wasn’t right.

“Yeah, no. It’s cool. Hey, take it easy, alright?” he said. He got a little nod in return and they parted ways. Brett headed back towards his place but the cold in the air got stuck in his lungs.

He was a fucking detective. He’d get to the bottom of this.

He started with interrogating Murdock because if there was anything he’d learned in this godforsaken career it was that 90% of the time, the culprit was the partner.

Matt Murdock was puzzled to be in Brett’s presence for so long without hostility.

“Can I buy you a coffee, Matt?” Brett asked, hoping that first names would make his intentions apparent.

“Why, detective,” Murdock gasped, “I’ll have you know, sir, I’m a committed man.”

Yeah, sure whatever.

Brett knew more than this guy even knew he knew about his sex life.

Matthew Murdock, for example, was not half as suave or romantic as he was in public in the sack. He was apparently extraordinarily ticklish and did not respond well to surprise sexy-times butterfly kissing. Or sneakily placed hickeys. So Fogs had told Brett while gesturing to his fat lip. He’s bony, Foggy had added irritably.

Such knowledge as this made Brett immune to the guy’s charms in person.

You sir, are a dork. And a nerd. And no amount of hair wax or crow’s feet was going to get you out of it.

Murdock seemed to realize that his dashing nature was not having the desired effect and pouted a little, although he agreed to the coffee after he got out of court.

Matt Murdock was an emotional brick wall, Brett came to see.

He did a really good job of pretending to understand what was going on and an even better job of sympathizing with Brett’s concerns, but Brett didn’t feel like they were on the same page at all.

When Brett said, “Fogs has seemed kind of out of it lately. A little distant. Almost like he’s faking it.” Murdock’s immediate response was to stiffen a bit and then force himself to ease up and say, “That’s strange. I haven’t noticed anything different.”

“You haven’t noticed him acting any different?” Brett repeated because he couldn’t really believe that. Foggy was the most open of all open books. His pages were public domain and practically scattered to the wind.

“No, I don’t think so. He’s been spending more time with Jess and Claire lately, but besides that, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Jess and Claire. Brett made a mental note of the names.

“I’m worried about him,” he said.

Murdock walled right the fuck off.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said sincerely. What he didn’t say is “and I’ll tell you exactly nothing, and I don’t want to discuss this further,” but Brett heard it all the same.

Murdock had problems, Brett knew that he had problems. No one lived the kind of life that Matt had and came out of it unscathed.

While Foggy and Brett had lived in Hell’s Kitchen and endured their working-class childhood the way most working-class kids did, Matt Murdock had grown up a few blocks over and down and that was. Well, there was no nice way to say it.

It was a shithole.

Matt was one of those kids who, when asked where he’d grown up would probably say simply “Hell’s Kitchen” or would throw out a few cross streets because he’d moved so much as a baby that he couldn’t remember having an address for more than maybe a year at a time. Foster care probably hadn’t helped that.

Matt Murdock, however, was one of those people who shut down their trauma, rather than dealing it in screams and violence.

He had problems, yeah he did.

Brett could only imagine what kind; maybe he and Fogs were trying to deal with some of them. Maybe Foggy was worried about Matt, was scared that he might do something to hurt himself or someone else.

90% of the time, it was the partner.

He had to trust his gut.

He “bumped” into Karen and offered to replace the drink she spilled all down her front. She told him he didn’t have to, but he did it anyways.

It gave him an excuse to talk. To bring up Fogs.

“No, I think he’s working through something,” Karen noted as they waited for her new drink to be made. “He’s been a little down lately, but I think he’s trying to hide it from Matt.”

Ah. So Murdock wasn’t the problem here? Doubtful. Continue, Ms. Page.

“I heard him and Matt talking yesterday, but they didn’t get very far. Fogs kept shutting him down.”

A snoop after Brett’s own heart. Do continue.

“I dunno, I thought they were fine, but whatever it is, it’s freaking Matt out a little. He’s doing his nervous thing.”

What nervous thing?

“He kind of fidgets like this.”

Karen showed him with her hand, she rubbed her thumb against the first knuckle of her middle finger on same hand.

“He does it when he thinks, but he also does it when he thinks someone is upset with him.”

Yes, because even though Matt Murdock hid his problems, he couldn’t shut them out completely.

“I’m just kind of worried about Fogs,” Brett told Karen. “I don’t like to see him upset. I get that that doesn’t come across much, but I really do give a shit about him.”

Karen evaluated him for the veracity of this statement and pursed her lips. In the time it took for her to retrieve her new drink, she’d made up her mind.

She walked towards the door of the café and turned her head over her shoulder.

“Walk with me,” she said.

Karen Page, if she wasn’t such a pain in the ass and had more professional training, would have made a great cop.

She was just the right level of brutal and honest and she squared up like no one Brett had seen before.

He thought she looked like she could kill a man if she needed to.

Probably had. But that’s neither here, nor there.

“Foggy keeps a lot of people’s secrets,” Karen explained as they walked.

Yeah, no shit.

“He’s keeping some of Matt’s, too.”

Of course he was.

“I’m sure Matt’s keeping some of Foggy’s secrets, too,” he told Karen. She gave him a strong look.

“Let’s stop pretending that Foggy has secrets,” she said. “We both know the only secrets he keeps are other peoples’.”

She was sharp, Ms. Page. Now, lady, why you gotta be such a pain in the ass?

Also, involved with Frank Castle? Why you gotta go do those things?

“What’s Matt done to Foggy?” he asked.

“It’s not what Matt’s doing to Foggy,” Karen volleyed back.

It’s what he’s doing to himself.

“Is he aware of what he’s doing?” he asked.

Karen stopped. She turned to him.

“Detective, just think for a minute, would you?” she said. “You know what’s going on, you’ve been here the whole time. Think about it some. I think you’ll figure it out, and then you’ll get it.”

She had a meeting. Brett let her go.

So it had to do with Matt. And it had to do with secrets. And it had to do with a timeline of events.

This was detective work. Brett was a detective.

Matt Murdock was five feet, ten inches tall. He was, if Brett had to guess, between 160 and 180 pounds. It was hard to tell since he always wore suits.

He was white, third or fourth generation Irish. Catholic. Athletic build.

He went to church like clockwork.

He’d lived a life in the foster care system.

He was blind.

If you watched him closer than usual, perhaps the teeniest bit like a stalker with a good cause, no really, then you might notice that he moved his head around jerkily when he walked. He seemed startled sometimes when there was nothing to be startled about.

Sometimes, he had a gym bag slung over his shoulder.

If you watched like the good, friendly, well-meaning stalker you were, just a little closer than was probably acceptable even by undercover standards, you might notice that Matt Murdock went to an ages-old gym.

Fogwell’s was an institution. It was constantly being renovated, yet no matter how much renovation went on, it always managed to look and smell like the 70s. Maybe the 80s.

Battlin’ Jack Murdock had been a product of Fogwell’s gym. It only made sense that his baby came to visit his ghost sometimes.

It didn’t make sense that said baby liked to go around eleven at night, when the place was shut up. A set of keys were left on the counter, waiting for him.

So he and Fogwell had an arrangement. Noted.

There was no way for even the most accomplished stalker to watch a man inside a building from street level, so Brett went for a walk. Waited around. Answered work emails on his phone.

Waited until 12:30, when Matthew Murdock decided he’d had enough of whatever he’d been doing inside.

It was 12:30am. And he’d gotten a little lax.

He left the building without his cane.

He left the building without his cane.

It was really, really hard to breathe through that. To watch what was happening in front of him and to understanding that it really was happening.

He knew what he had to do.

He got out of his car.

He didn’t try to walk softly.

Eventually, he found himself standing behind Matthew Murdock.

Murdock stopped walking.

Brett did, too.

“It’s real fucked up, man,” Brett said to Murdock’s back. His breath made clouds in the air which he was now certain Matthew Murdock could see.

Matt tipped his head up to the sky and seemed to evaluate all his choices. He tipped it slowly the other way and, even though Brett couldn’t see him doing it, he knew he was smirking.

“You don’t even know the half of it, detective,” he said simply.

Anger pulsed hot in Brett’s neck and spread through his chest, through his lungs.

“Is this a game to you, Murdock?” he asked. “People believe you when you do your little act. I believed you.”

Matt said nothing, although he did balance his head out and tip it down.

“I’m insulted, detective,” he said.

“Yeah, so’m I,” Brett replied.

The air was cold and their breath made clouds, and although it might have been Brett’s imagination, Matt’s didn’t seem make as big of ones as he did. Probably all the anger.

“I’m _insulted_ , detective,” Murdock repeated. “That it’s taken you this long.”

Sorry, what?

“What, to figure out you’re not blind, Matt?”

Silence.

A sigh.

“You’re all the same,” Murdock said, defeated. As if he was the victim here.

“I can’t arrest you for being a grade A piece of shit, but I can tell you to get your shit together for Fogs,” Brett said before he could hold back the words.

Matt turned around his way and strode purposefully towards him. He walked confident. Tall.

Squared up.

He got in Brett’s space.

“Mahoney,” he said softly, leaning forward like some kind of cat, “I’m bored of this game.”

This man was dangerous.

This man was so fucking dangerous.

How had Brett been fooled by that—

“You called in your expert Brett, couple weeks back. Dr. Mendez? Is that right?”

Dr…Mendez? Yeah the—

“Ophthalmologist. That’s right. Remember what she told you? She said, and I quote, ‘I’m surprised he has eyes still.’ ‘It must have hurt like hell.’”

How could he know what she told them? He had been in the interrogation room.

“How do you—”

“So I think I’m done playing _this_ fucking game.”

Matt Murdock took off his glasses and couldn’t meet Brett’s eyes. His own were light and dark at the same time, hazel almost. They were empty.

Empty like a wooden bowl with nothing inside its hollow.

“I. Am. Blind.” He said. “And it’s none of your goddamn business how I live my life. And it’s none of your goddamn business what I do with my partner. Keep the fuck out of it, detective. Or things won’t end nicely for you.”

Brett’s heart was pounding, every nerve in his body screaming danger. This man was danger.

Fogs couldn’t be with him. Brett couldn’t let Fogs be with him.

“Are you threatening me, Matt?” he asked as calmly as his pulse would allow.

“Are you scared?” Matt asked him with all those fucking white teeth.

Yes. Absolutely. You’re a psychopath.

“Scared or mad, it’s hard to tell sometimes,” Matt continued. “Doesn’t matter, though. Can’t do anything, can you, detective? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home.”

He turned around carefully and left Brett standing in a cold street at 12:43am.

There were a thousand times in his life where Brett had kept himself from letting his work life bleed into his personal life, but this? No. Brett couldn’t stand by and let this shit happen to Foggy.

Foggy didn’t deserve to be with a man like Matt Murdock—no wait, that wasn’t right. Matt Murdock didn’t deserve to be a with a man like Foggy Nelson.

Maynard noticed his bouncing knee at his desk and commented on it, but he ignored her. He couldn’t focus on anything. He dug out his phone and texted Fogs to get a drink after work.

It took Foggy a few hours to get back to him, but he agreed.

He’d barely gotten his drink at the bar and dragged Foggy over to the table when he was talking.

“Foggy, I need to talk to you,” he said. Foggy glanced from at the hand on his arm and then back to Brett’s face with a frown that only deepened with each passing second.

Brett prayed to God that he already knew. That this was a secret he’d been keeping. That they could work something—anything—out of this.

“Yeah, evidently. What’s your problem, man?” Foggy snipped at him.

“It’s about Matt. I know what’s happening, I get it. I know he’s—”

Foggy jerked back and pulled his arm away in shock. He reached behind him and lowered himself slowly into the chair at the table. Brett followed suit, biting his lip.

“Oh my god, he _told_ you?” Fogs gasped. “He’s never told anyone by his own volition, before. That’s—I don’t even know what that is.”

Brett swallowed hard. Didn’t even look at his drink.

“Well, I mean. He didn’t exactly. Not in so many words, at least. I more figured it out on my own but listen Fogs. I get it, he’s—”

“Oh my god. You saw him?”

“Yeah, and he’s dangerous Foggy. He’s—”

“No, I know, Daredevil.”

“Not…Blind…”

That.

Was Not.

What he’d meant.

“Oh _shit_ ,” Foggy swore upon recognizing the long pause for what it was.

“Holy shit.”

“Oh fuck. Oh shit. No, I didn’t say that.”

“Oh my god,” Brett found himself whispering. It all made sense now. It _all_ made so much fucking sense; how the fuck had he been so fucking stupid.

“Oh my god, Brett. It’s uh—”

Fogs, this whole time, had been covering for that motherfucker. Because that motherfucker was _Daredevil_. He came to Brett, he trusted Brett because Foggy trusted Brett. He was at every Wilson Fisk scene because he’d made it to begin with.

“Oh my god, I fucked up so bad, Jesus. Brett, please, _please_ , don’t tell anyone.”

Fogs had tears in his eyes, he was choking down and sniffing back a breakdown and Brett couldn’t, he just couldn’t, leave him like that.

“Okay,” he gasped, practically heaving himself, “Okay, okay. This is fine. We’re fine. This is fine. Crazy. Dead fucking crazy but fine.”

That lasted maybe a second.

“Fogs, this is not fucking fine.”

“I _know_ ,” Foggy gasped miserably.

“Like, every kind of not fucking fine on top of a huge pile of not fucking fine, what the—”

“Brett, I know. I know, I swear to god, I know better than anyone.”

And he did. He had to. The back of Brett’s head made clicking noises and pieces slotted together.

“You’re worried about him?” he said slowly. Foggy wiped the unshed tears from his eyes and nodded soundlessly.

“You still love him,” Brett said.

More nodding.

“Despite all the--?”

“Yes,” Fogs said, like a man pressed in confession, “Despite and because. He’s a good person, Brett. You—you—I can’t explain it, you’ve seen it. You’ve worked with him, he’s sweet and dopey and excitable and he loves what he does and he helps people, Brett. He does, he spends every second of his life he can spare helping people.”

“He threatened me last night.”

Fogs stared heavenward and Brett hated that he felt a lump in his own throat at the guy’s distress.

“He only does that when he feels threatened.”

“He’s not blind, Foggy.”

Foggy’s brow creased like the words were physically painful. He swallowed hard.

“No,” he said, “He is blind. And that’s what makes this whole thing so much more surreal.”

He couldn’t be.

“Brett, he is, I swear to god. We lived together, we live together. I know.”

He’s lying.

“Not about this.”

The eye doctor, though. He can’t do parkour. He—

“He lied about that, but not about this.”

The silence that fell over their corner table was suffocating. The chatter of the rest of the bar seemed so distant.

“Brett, I’ve got to tell him. Come with me, he can explain. Give him a chance to explain.”

Well, what else was he supposed to do?

Matt’s apartment wasn’t too far away and rather than knocking, Foggy just said, “Matt, open the door,” when they were stood outside it.

It opened like he’d already been on the way to get it.

He wasn’t wearing gym clothes or lawyer clothes or Daredevil clothes. He wore jeans and an old sweatshirt, one that Brett recognized as Foggy’s. He tipped his head at Foggy in concern and then, a beat later, rounded on Brett.

All those teeth.

How had he not recognized that sneer?

They went inside in silence.

“Matty, I’m sorry.”

Matt said nothing, but hostility practically wafted off of him.

“I’m so sorry,” Foggy said, pulling at his hands. He managed to dislodged one of them from where Matt had crammed it against his ribs when he crossed his arms.

He was furious. Silently furious.

“I don’t know what else to say,” Foggy continued. Matt pulled his hand away and set his jaw. 

“It’s fine,” he said, flat as a board.

It wasn’t. Brett was looking at a guy who could have killed every single person he’d touched over the last what, ten? Twenty years? How long did it take to build up that kind of skill? How long had he been hiding it?

Fogs bowed his head in Matt’s kitchen and tried to fight back the tears and upset and it made Brett’s diaphragm squeeze and twist. Matt watched Fogs for a moment (was it watching? Or was it something else) before he softened and leaned forward to wrap an arm around Foggy’s waist. He pulled him in close and let him bury his face into his neck.

“It’s fine,” Matt said, far kinder this time, “It’s not your fault. It was going to happen, we both knew it was going to happen.”

Foggy said something which was muffled, but which Brett knew from his head to his knees was “but it shouldn’t have been me.”

Brett didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to make this right. He had a responsibility to do something, but he didn’t know what the fuck it even was anymore.

Matt stared at him over Foggy’s shoulder, cold, calm. Promising something which Brett couldn’t figure out. He gently pried Foggy out of his neck and thumbed away the tears. He pressed their foreheads together.

“It’s okay,” he said, “If the detective wants to know, then he gets to know. And then, we’ll let him decide how he’s going to handle it.”

Brett did not like the fucking sound of that.

He did not like Matt’s hollow gaze finding his own somehow.

It wasn’t violence that look was promising, it was a challenge.

Brett had walked into a minefield. A fucking minefield.

A field covered in goddamned mines, all of which were horrifying little bombs of information which could threaten the lives and wellbeing of every living soul in the city.

Matt Murdock told him patiently that yes, he was Daredevil. Yes, they’d worked together on multiple occasions, and yes, he took on much of the crime which the NYPD failed to catch in their nets in the Kitchen.

That much, Brett could understand, but then Murdock brought out the big guns. The fucking scars on his body. His war with some kind of cult. His ongoing feud with Wilson Fisk. The associated drug rings, human traffickers, assassins, lawyers, gunmen, mobsters, gangs, all of it. You name it.

Daredevil had his thumb on the pulse of Hell’s Kitchen and he traced the webs backwards and forwards through the bodies and the drugs and the bullets. He ran interference, kept Fisk’s guys from their power, cut off mob communications and resources everywhere he could, put his body between people and the dregs of society, even when poverty and desperation made those dregs unusually familiar.

“If you take me out, detective,” Murdock—no, Daredevil said in his emotionless tone, “That’s your prerogative. But just know that there are only two of us in this city who can do what I can, and the other one is much stronger and less discerning than me. Once I’m gone, you and your team will need to step up. It’s either that or someone else will or no one else will, and I can tell you right now that both of those are some pretty shit options.”

Only two people like him. How did he know that?

“Because my sensei only trained two of us.”

Oh, a sensei now? Was this some kind of Karate Kid shit?

“My life isn’t a fucking joke, Mahoney.”

Foggy hissed at Matt to be civil, which was, in itself, a validation of the truth in those words.

This was insanity. This could not be real. This didn’t happen to people.

“Yeah, I’m not people. I’ve been fucked since day one. Make up your mind, detective. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t fight you, but I’ll at least let you make your decision.”

He needed to think.

“If I don’t get time, then you don’t, either. Make up your mind.”

No, he needed to think. He needed to weigh everything on the table here. Foggy wouldn’t look at him. Could he do this to Fogs? Could he take away the man he loved, the guy keeping all the shit in the city at bay? Could he do that?

“I need time, Matt,” he said firmly. Because he did.

“Me fucking too, pal,” Matt volleyed back.

Brett’s fingers and toes were freezing, and it wasn’t just because the room was cold. He took in a shuddering breath.

“I need to talk to one person,” he said.

“Who.”

Not a question.

He breathed out a shaky breath.

Amos was four years old and the light of Brett’s life. He didn’t have a wife or kids of his own, hadn’t really been interested in that kind of life for most of his time on the force. But the second Amos had been born, and Brett’s sister had laid him into Brett’s arms, he’d thought that maybe, actually, it might be nice one day.

Amos stayed at his mom’s on Friday and Wednesday nights so that his sister and her boyfriend could have a break. Date night, movie night, whatever. Brett tried to come by to spend time with him when he could so that his mom wouldn’t spoil the child rotten.

She was getting older, his mom, and Amos was getting bigger.

Amos had every Avenger action figure they could afford. He adored Captain America. He adored the Falcon. He’d wanted to be the Hulk for Halloween for two years in a row.

His new thing had become Spiderman lately and he agitated the fuck out of Kelly as to why there wasn’t a Spiderman action figure yet, and when were they making one, and could he have one, please, please, please, mama?

But Amos was an unusually aware little kid and he liked to climb into Brett’s lap and ask him to tell him about his encounters with the superhero of their neighborhood. The man who Uncle Brett worked with, his co-hero, because Brett was a hero in this baby boy’s eyes.

Amos was groggy and grumpy at being awakened at 2am on a Friday, but once he saw who it was waking him up, he shook himself out of it and demanded affection.

Brett held him close and pressed a kiss to the side of his warm head.

“Amos, I need your help,” he said.

Amos pushed against him so that he could sit up.

“Kay?” he said.

“I met Daredevil just now,” Brett told him seriously, softly so his mom wouldn’t wake up. “And I’ve got to decide whether I do my policeman job and arrest him, or whether I let him go.”

Amos stared at him like he was being dense, which was exactly what Brett needed in that moment.

“You can’t arrest Daredevil. He’s a hero,” Amos said with a frown. “He protects mom and dad and grandma, and you, Uncle Brett.” He thought for a moment and then brightened up, “And me! He protects me, too.”

Oh, honey.

Yeah, he does, doesn’t he?

“I want you to fucking know that I am not okay with this,” Brett told Matt in the doorway.

Matt cocked his head abruptly, listening for whatever the hell it was he did, and blinked at him.

Then he grinned.

“Welcome to the underworld, detective,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not as funny as the other ones, hey what you gonna do sometimes things aren't funny


	7. does it get better?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’d left him to bleed out, but he said one of them had put something on his eyes before they’d left. He’d held onto them, because he’d never had anyone do that before and he wanted something to stuff down their throats when he got ahold of them in future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey another case fic fun

Brett had thought that knowing that Matthew Murdock was a teeth-smashing fuckhead would change his life dramatically and in some ways it did, but not in any of the ways that counted.

For example, he now had a fuckload of unfounded and unwelcome anxiety when Daredevil was sighted limping away from a crime scene.

Even though Foggy straight up told him it wouldn’t do shit, he tried coaching the guy in how and when to use emergency services. Yet, no matter how many times they went through the drill, it always ended up like:

“Okay, so if a civilian gets hurt then you?”

“Call an ambulance.”

“Perfect. And when _you_ get hurt you?”

“Assess the damage.”

“Uh, okay—”

“Fast right hook.”

“No--”

“Incapacitate the target.”

“Matt. Matt, no—”

“End the altercation. Pressure on the wound. Maybe take an ibuprofen.” 

Brett had laid on this man in his living room, hissing and spitting, trying to impart the correct information the best he could, but the closest Matt got to ‘go to the hospital’ was ‘go see Sister Maggie.’ Which Foggy told Brett was as good as he was going to get.

So that was one kind of anxiety.

There were also the new concerns that came with the realization that Matt was, in fact, still very, very blind. Although he had alternate ways of navigating the world, these came with whole new set of their own problems. Colors, for example, still spelt trouble to the guy (“Listen, Matthew. If you encounter an explosive device, and there are wire-things, what do you do?” “Find a sighted friend or take it to Wade.” “ _What?_ No. Take it to the police.” “That what I said. Or Wade.” “ _Not_ Wade.” “Frank?” “No.”) so did screens. Not to mention that any distraction or detraction in his awareness, for so much as a second, meant that he could damn well just walk out into a street and get hit by a car. He didn’t do crowded spaces well. He didn’t do snow well. There were so many things which Brett was now suddenly hyperaware of when the captain asked him to deal with Daredevil on something or when the guy’s name came up in relation to one of those absurdist, gang ambush crimes.

And yeah, those new fears had changed his outlook on Daredevil dramatically, but then Matt went and did shit like teaching Spidey how to fight four people at once or stealing Frank Castle’s rifle in the middle of Midtown, and Brett was swiftly reminded that Matt was more than capable of being a functional violent idiot all on his own.

Most importantly to Brett’s work however, he was a bad fucking influence.

Brett had received an extraordinarily polite letter from Colonel James Rhodes, and after he’d died a little at the honor of receiving any form of correspondence from Colonel James Rhodes, he’d opened it and found it formally asking him to stop giving Spidey resin in return for information or aerial support.

Why, you might ask?

Because he’d made resin knives.

Resin.

Knives.

Knives made out of resin.

And when he wasn’t satisfied with this, he’d gone out his adorable, doe-eyed little way to invent a new type of polymer from the acquired resin which made even sharper, even lighter not-quite-resin knives. These he took to Deadpool and DD and these, to Matt’s delight, could be slipped through metal detectors, including the ones at the courthouse.

In return for such gifts, _someone_ had trained Spidey in the art of knife-throwing and he was getting far too good at it, Colonel Rhodes wrote. The kid was developing almost superhuman aim and had been causing chaos in Stark Industries’ labs in increasingly creative and concerning ways.

“We are pleased that Peter is learning how to work with the NYPD, but we would humbly request that all future rewards, bribes, etc. take the form of edible or otherwise age-appropriate goods.

Sincerely,

Colonel J. Rhodes.”

Brett respected this letter and what it stood for, but it meant he occasionally had to google teenage culture because he had no fucking clue what was both age-appropriate and appealing to people Peter’s age anymore.

Peter did not like any of the google results half as much as he’d liked the resin. And that was an issue. He’d started to reject some of Brett’s jobs on the grounds of a lack of an equivalent exchange.

Brett had gone to Matt, because wow, look, finally a perk of knowing the asshole, and Matt had given him one of his confused, but ultimately disinterested looks.

“Fuck Rhodes, just give him what he asks for,” he said.

No. Nope. Wrong answer.

We do not disregard war heroes’ requests. That is very bad form, Matthew.

“What the hell do I care about form? What’s he done for me?”

Preserved your country?

“Doing what? Murdering children in the Middle East? No thanks, fuck Colonel Rhodes. Pete’s in a sharpening-things phase. We’ve all been there. Let him have his fun.”

Have we? Is that really a thing we all go through?

Brett thought fucking not.

Brett found himself spending the night following this bonkers conversation standing between two parties of screaming drunk people while trying to examine a body in the middle of the street. On the way back to the car to escape the noise, he noticed a little silver coin in the street. It was bloody and had an insignia on it he didn’t recognize.

He called forensics over and they took pictures and told him they’d send him their findings soon.

He got a blown-up image of the insignia the next day and had been frowning at it for a full minute when Ellen passed by and whistled.

“That a token?” she asked.

A token? Well, apparently.

“Yeah, I heard that the Irish started handing them out to people they want taken care of.”

Oh, no shit?

“No shit.”

He had to pass the case along, and didn’t really think much more of it until Fogs called him and asked him if he could collect a piece of evidence from an “anonymous tipper.”

There was a woman pinning Matt to his apartment floor and yelling at him when Brett arrived and he quickly saw why. The guy looked like a trainwreck. He was too tired and sad and pained to yell back for once, so the gal was taking the fucking mick out of him while she could.

“What happened?” he asked Foggy as the lady, Claire her name was, pulled shards of glass out of Matt’s abused side.

“He won’t tell me,” Foggy groused, fuming in Matt’s direction.

Claire then did something which made Matt make a horrible little whining noise and Foggy’s irritation was replaced immediately with sympathy, and he abandoned Brett to go hold his boo’s hand, er. Head. The hand wasn’t allowed to be touched at the moment.

It took some coaxing (and some illegal morphine) but Matt finally revealed that he’d had the living shit kicked out of him by, guess who?

The Irish.

They’d left him to bleed out, but he said one of them had put something on his eyes before they’d left. He’d held onto them, because he’d never had anyone do that before and he wanted something to stuff down their throats when he got ahold of them in future. Foggy handed Brett two coins with a very familiar insignia on them.

He’d bagged them and thanked his anonymous tippers, then left Matt to sleep it, and the rage, off.

He didn’t have to wait long before he got a call from Anthony Goddamn Stark asking him if he would mind coming by Stark Industries like _now_.

You don’t exactly refuse a call from Tony Stark.

Ellen and fucking Goldberg went with him.

The first thing Brett noticed about Tony Stark’s personal lab was that one of its automatic doors was shattered.

Shattered but still fully functional. Merrily scattering bits of plexiglass with its every move.

He decided that he was going to pretend that that had absolutely nothing to do with him giving Peter resin at all.

The inside of the lab was not a lab. It was a scrapyard. Brett’s mom’s worst nightmare. Colonel Rhodes, as he led them in, took the novel approach of screaming for his buddy, rather than trying to locate him like a normal human being.

And for good reason.

Once located (through mutual shouting), Stark was half inside something which reminded Brett of the Iron Giant’s head, cursing like his life depended on it. Peter was slumped over the table next to him, with no shirt on and a chest plastered over in bandages. His forearms and elbows were torn right the fuck up and he didn’t wake up to greet Brett like he normally did.

Brett gut reaction was to gather the kid up and take him home. He needed to be home with that kind of damage, not in some cold ass lab.

He refrained for the sake of professionalism.

“Mr. Stark—” he started to say, but was interrupted by Colonel Rhodes snapping,

“Tony, what the hell are you doing? Cops. Here. Now.”

Which was, uh. One way to do it.

“Tony” must have smashed his head against something in that giant dome because the whole thing suddenly rang like a bell. He re-emerged, shorter than Brett had expected him to be, with his hands covered in a foul mixture of flaking blood and oil.

“Ah, detective. Nay, detect _ives_. Which one of you is Mahoney?”

Brett grimaced and raised a hand.

“Oh, excellent. Here, this is for you.”

And Tony fucking Stark put, in the middle of his palm, two pieces of metal which looked like they’d recently been coughed up by a dog.

Brett knew exactly what they were by then. He looked at Peter. Stark looked with him.

“Kid was choking on ‘em, when I got the alert,” Stark explained nonchalantly, like he hadn’t obviously crammed his fingers down Peter’s throat to save the poor boy’s life.

Oh god, he hadn’t meant it.

Someone take this child home.

And someone else get Brett some damn hand sanitizer.

“He’s going home after Dr. Cho looks him over one last time,” Stark assured him.

Thank fuck there was at least one super person in the world who still believed in official medical intervention.

“It’s unusual of him to send me an alert,” Stark continued, reaching over to pet Peter’s hair. Colonel Rhodes caught his arm before he could and waved at it in disgust. Stark hummed and abandoned them to go scrub up in a nearby sink.

“I thought I’d seen that symbol somewhere,” he said over the water. “I was right. Some idiot left an indentation of it in that guy right there. Used to be down at the docks before I had it brought home for repairs. Some drunk idiot must have punched it with a ring or something.”

“That guy right there” was the Iron Giant’s head, which must have been some kind of SI device.

“It usually holds some of the control boxes for the weather station out there,” Colonel Rhodes explained.

Oh.

Good to know.

Brett and the others bagged the coins and asked if they could talk to Peter. Stark, with clean arms to the elbow, gave them a long look before approaching the kid and gently rolling him to the side. With surprising strength, he scooped the kid up and kicked a button at the bottom of panel next to the sink, which opened to reveal a beat to shit set of couches and a little kitchenette.

It must have been where Stark slept when he locked himself in his labs.

Peter started to wake up a little muzzily, when Stark went to set him carefully onto one of the sofas. He was just conscious enough to bitch at Stark he wasn’t that little. Stark ignored his protests. They were hoarse and slurred.

Peter managed to recognize Brett through the haze and was amendable to answering some questions when Stark and Colonel Rhodes left them alone.

“Peter, do you know what these are?” Brett asked him, holding up the bag of coins.

He shook his head with his eyes half open.

“Do you know who hurt you?” Brett asked next. Peter swayed his head from side to side again, as if looking for the guys in the room with them.

“There were a lot of them,” he croaked, “They were doing something to a lot of girls. Takin’ ‘em somewhere.”

Brett’s skin prickled.

“Where are the girls, Peter?”

“They ran away.”

Oh, thank fuck.

“You distracted them, then?”

A sleepy nod.

“And they beat up on you?”

Another nod.

“They hurt you pretty bad, huh?”

Peter swallowed and was distracted and confused by Ellen and Goldberg. Brett had to call his name to get his attention back.

“Can you tell me what they did to you?”

Peter described something which sounded unsettlingly like what Matt had gone through.

“They said they were gonna make an ‘xample of me,” he concluded.

Fuck.

“We’re gonna get ‘em, Pete,” he assured him. “You don’t go after them, okay? We’re gonna handle this one.”

Peter was already dozing again. He didn’t nod or respond at all. Ellen stepped out to talk to Stark and Colonel Rhodes some more. Brett hunted around and found an ancient quilt which lived in the room, he tossed it over the kid, which got a reaction at least.

He whined and made himself into a Peter-burrito while grumbling that he was fine and why was everyone treating him like he was little today?

It was hard work not to laugh at him.

The final straw was when Frank Castle walked into the station, dragging a screaming, bloody man by the back of his jacket and said that he’d like to report a motherfucking assault.

There was a piece missing from Frank Castle’s ear.

Horrifyingly, he said it wasn’t for him and gestured back to a group of timid young women crowded around the station entrance, all still dressed in club-going clothes, despite it being 8 in the morning.

Brett didn’t know what else to do and was about to offer Castle medical attention when the guy dropped his, uh, prey to the station floor and blurted out,

“The fuck is my car?” before following the same trail of blood he brought in right back out the door. 

Brett had two teams of officers with him on this case. They were going to bust the Irish for their recent attempts at human trafficking, but by the time they got to the warehouse their intel said the group was gathering, Wade Wilson was already there, sitting on an old crate, rocking back and forth and swearing at a dollar store crossword puzzle book.

He hauled one of the bodies by his feet up and held their face level with the book.

“Ten letter word for a cave dweller,” he said.

The guy dribbled blood down his front.

“No, I already tried ‘neckbeard,’ that’s only nine,” Wilson huffed.

The guy groaned.

“No, ‘cave-dweller’ is too obvious _and_ there’s a hyphen. Keep going though, you’re doing good work.”

Okay.

So that was happening.

Wade Wilson took to harassing all the people trying to remove his victims from the scene. No one knew what to say, except Kayla, the EMT who, out of fucking nowhere, shrieked “TROGLODYTE” in triumph and got a crow of delight and double high-five in return for her trouble.

Technically they needed to question Deadpool and, terrifyingly, he came along willingly.

Brett couldn’t decide if he was manic or having a schizophrenic episode or what as he stood outside the interview room with a handful of officers and the captain.

Wade was having a great time inside. He’d popped three of his fingers back into place and had made good progress on his crossword.

He kind of bopped along to whatever tune was in his head and Brett emphatically did _not_ want to be the one to interview him.

The captain took pity upon him.

Ellen sat down and had barely opened her mouth when Wilson said,

“They touched my babies, ma’am, there was nothing else I could do.”

And Ellen didn’t know what the fuck that meant, but Brett did and in some fucked up kind of way, it was heart-warming.

Deadpool must have come to know what had happened to his, uh. Compatriots? Teammates? Babies. And set out to put an end to that nonsense.

A warehouse of gang members was, it was now apparent, a walk in the park for the guy.

He explained happily that he’d catfished them. All of them.

Separately.

And told them to meet little old Bella Wilson at this one place at the docks where nobody ever goes, tee hee.

“Uh, is Bella a real person? Should we be looking for her?” Ellen asked because the job made her.

Wilson paused and reflected on this and appeared to be struck by a devastating thought.

“Fuck, I think I made her into one,” he said.

They did not understand. Ellen tried to understand.

“No, no. It’s like. We, people, make other things into people, right?” Wade asked her. She nodded and made a high-pitched affirmative sound because leaving the room wasn’t an option.

“Right, so I, person, Wade Wilson, think that I, person, Wade Wilson, have made her, cat, Belladonna Don’t-eat-That Wilson, into a person.”

“So she’s a cat?” Ellen squeaked.

“Oh, yeah. I’m fattening her up for the winter.”

What.

Was.

 _Wrong_ with this man.

The next time Brett saw Deadpool was when he stopped by to make sure Matt was still alive a few days after his latest adventure. Foggy let him in and said Matt was in the bedroom.

Matt was fine.

In a sense of the word.

He was tucked up in bed with Wilson lounging next to him, reading to him from Edgar Allen Poe.

Brett had to have a good long think about this, trying to parse the limits of the definition of ‘fine.’

Matt was deeply invested in this shit, as someone like him obviously would be, and he kept interrupting to point out plotholes in this narrative until Wilson told him that he was going to shut the fuck up, have nightmares, and like it.

Matt hunkered down, all pleased with himself. He told Wade to keep reading.

Brett needed a drink.

Maybe six.

Possibly ketamine.

He found Foggy in the kitchen and crowded him and whispered,

“Fogs, Fogs, _Fogs.”_

“They’re fine.”

“On what planet?”

“This one.”

“Franklin.”

Foggy cocked a hip and gave him a scathing look.

“It’s this or GhostHunters, Brett. This at least has literary merit.”

What fucking world did these people live in?

Maynard asked him what the fuck he was doing when she came in from her break and he told her he was making a flow chart.

He wasn’t lying.

He needed to figure out exactly how to escape this vigilante prison he’d built himself into. 


	8. like a crumb of illegality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Holy shit, it’s you,” Hawkeye said, which were the first words besides “HUH?” Brett had managed to pry out of him. Matt stiffened from ass to neck, apparently recognizing Hawkeye’s voice.
> 
> “Oh god, it’s you,” he groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so Matt's met Clint one time in the DFV in 'thimble of liquor.' They were both all decked out as Daredevil and Hawkeye, so they've never interacted outside that space, although Clint is aware of and in contact with Foggy.

Brett was rewarded for two full weeks of vigilante-free police work with one week positively crammed full of them.

First he’d had to have a chat with Spidey about the knife situation and, like his asshole horned sibling, he was not interested in invocations of safety or the common good. He was a good fucking actor though, because he told Brett with a sickly sweet smile that no, sir, he totally understood where he was coming from. And yes sir, he would definitely use discretion in making weapons in the future. And no, sir, he absolutely did not intend to start up any kind of market in concealable weaponry in the near future.

Lies.

On every count.

Brett almost believed him at first, you just couldn’t help it with the kid, but he caught himself. He had learned over the last few months to be paranoid and to read between the lines with these assholes. No means yes and yes means no and “I had nothing to do with it” was only the truth 20% of the time.

After he’d taught Spidey zero lessons whatsoever, Brett was called in by the Harlem crowd to speak with Luke Cage, who, he learned, had information and had requested to speak to him and only him.

Luke Cage told him that his smaller companion, Iron Fist, had gotten the shit kicked out of him by some vigilante who was new on the scene and had since disappeared. He explained that he wasn’t there looking for police intervention, rather he was looking to tell a trustworthy officer that one of their own was getting up to some trouble.

He did not file a missing person’s report, said he’d find his troublesome pal on his own.

He did not find his friend. Brett knew because Brett found his friend.

Iron Fist’s real people name was Daniel Thomas Rand and he was? Oddly kind and cooperative? Brett had some serious concerns about all these peoples’ two-facedness. His sister told him knowledgably that every one of them had to be Geminis. He didn’t exactly plan on taking a poll, but he might have asked Fogs when Matt’s birthday was. Just to check.

He was not even remotely a Gemini.

Mr. Rand wasn’t a Gemini either.

Rand was, however, very happy to be released from his watery, sewer prison and even happier to jab a finger at one Officer Tahler, who he then proceeded to get in the face of and try to fight, thereby proving that no walk of life would get between vigilantes and their shared personality traits.

Exhausting. They were all exhausting.

Rand went away and was replaced by Jessica Jones who needed to be questioned about her involvement with a missing person’s case. She slammed her door in their faces and told them to get a warrant or get fucked.

Camping out outside her door did not yield any desired results whatsoever.

Jones disappeared and her case bled into Rand’s and he swore to someone or something Brett could not hope to understand that Officer Tahler was the one who had killed their mutual missing person.

When Brett sighed and mistakenly gave the guy the impression that he didn’t believe him, Rand threw out his arm and whipped out a fucking knife and said he’d give his arm from the elbow if it wasn’t true and holy fucking shit, no. _Too cooperative_ , son. Far too cooperative.

Rand wouldn’t be talked out of it.

Brett was on the verge of having to put the guy on a psych hold when Jones reappeared to punch him in the shoulder and call him a fucking idiot. She cocked a hip at them all and told them she’d found their missing person. And he was good and dead.

“It was Tahler, wasn’t it?” Rand cried with determination.

Jones stared at him with pursed lips and lifeless eyes.

“It was Tahler,” she said.

Rand pumped his fist and celebrated by keeping his arm for yet another day.

Jones poured a metric shit ton of pictures and copies of receipts and footage and documents all over Brett’s desk, to the point where it started sliding off the sides of it and littered the floor around it. She evaluated him with cut eyes and told Brett that he wasn’t half bad.

Brett thought he’d done exactly nothing to earn such praise. He expressed this opinion and got squinted/glared at from that moment until Jones left the building with Rand in tow.

So that was fun. Just about as much fun as he was having right then, actually, where he had one of the Hawkeyes staring at him while he rattled the handcuff keeping him locked to Brett’s desk.

He’d been doing that shit for nearly half an hour.

Anytime Brett asked him to stop, he just said “HUH?” really loudly and kept right on rattling like a fucking dick. Brett would ask him again and he’d frown at him and nod a little bit, like ‘cool, cool, cool’ and he would proceed to not. Fucking. Stop.

Brett couldn’t get anything out of this guy.

And he was going to murder him in the middle of all these officers if he had to sit here for one second longer.

He told the guy to wait there for a minute and stepped out to call Foggy so as to preserve both of their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The guy watched him go with amazement.

“Brett, you fucking moron, that’s the deaf one,” Foggy hissed at him.

Oh.

Well.

“This is why you gotta _tell_ people shit,” Brett snapped back at him. Then floundered for a second, because had he just insulted the fuck out of his kind-of sort-of perp?

“I can’t tell you everything, no one would ever trust me again.”

Fair. But not the fucking point.

“What’s etiquette for working with deaf people?”

“Don’t cover your mouth and don’t shout at him.”

A pause.

“Brett, sometimes, I swear to fucking god—”

“I’ll apologize, okay? Are you his lawyer? He’s punched a guy out on his doorstep.”

“ _His_ doorstep?”

“No, the other guy’s.”

“Clint, _why_.”

So it was habitual. Another one for the notebook: Hawkeye goes around punching folks in the face. That’s a fun thing he does. A l’il quirk, if you will.

“Fogs, come deal with this. We’re gonna have to charge him with assault unless someone says something magical in the next fifteen minutes. Should I get an interpreter?”

“I can’t, I’m in court. I’ll send Matt. I don’t think they’ve met, but they’ll work it out.”

“Thank you.”

“Ugh.”

No one in this party of brains had clearly thought these circumstances through. Matt walked in just as Brett was trying to get Hawkeye to sign a statement as to what had happened between him and his frenemy. Matt didn’t recognize his client, as was to be expected. His client, however, recognized the hell out of him.

“Holy _shit_ , it’s you,” Hawkeye said, which were the first words besides “HUH?” Brett had managed to pry out of him. Matt stiffened from ass to neck, apparently recognizing Hawkeye’s voice.

“Oh god, it’s _you_ ,” he groaned.

So, a fine start all around.

“I’m not dealing with this,” Matt said, spinning around, but Hawkeye leapt up, only to slam his face into the corner of Brett’s desk when his arm didn’t come with him.

Perfect. Now they needed a medic, too.

A quick assessment from the nurse later, and Brett found himself watching Matt try and fail to give this man legal advice. He really did not like this guy and Brett could not figure out why.

Matt’s obvious disgust was compounded by his frustration. Hawkeye was, it turned out, not completely deaf but close to it. He didn’t, and Brett was baffled by this, seem to understand that Matt was blind. He signed while he spoke, when he finally spoke, and Matt was so fucking confused why this guy was waving at him. He kept trying to look over his shoulders to figure out what he could be waving at.

Which could only mean that Matt didn’t know that Hawkeye was deaf. Fogs must not have told him.

Whoops.

The two of them were basically a comedy duo waiting to happen.

“What you doing?” Matt finally snapped when Brett asked Hawkeye to verify his statement.

Hawkeye, sensing the sensitivity of the situation, dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “Dude, I’m signing.”

Oh, god. Brett already knew what was going to happen next. It was going to be the highlight of his year.

“Signing what?”

“What?”

“You’re signing ‘what,’” Matt said sarcastically with a look which could peel paint.

“Oh. Words.”

Matt’s jaw twitched.

“I _know_ how signing works, pal,” he growled. “I’m asking you what you’re signing. I need to know what you’re signing.”

Hawkeye squinted at him.

“What?” he asked, genuinely confused.

Matt started flushing red at that point and Brett was going to die.

“You’re signing _what_?” Matt tried to clarify again, about ready to throw himself out of the chair to strangle Hawkeye.

“I just fucking told you, man.”

“You know what? Just—just don’t sign anything. Brett--”

“Dude, what the fuck are you even saying right now?”

“I said don’t sign shit. Brett, can you--”

“Woah. I mean. That’s fucked up. That’s real fucked up.” Hawkeye crossed his arms and slouched low in his chair to demonstrate how heavy that statement truly was.

Matt was so confused.

And as much as he’d love for this Abbott and Costello act to go on for the rest of his life, Brett felt the need to do some clarifying for the sake of mankind here.

He cleared his throat.

“Mr. uh, Barton was it?”

“Huh?”

Ah, right.

“Matt, your client’s deaf.”

“WHAT.” Matt rounded on the guy in shock, “You’re deaf?”

“Oh, hey, there we go,” Hawkeye said happily, sitting up turning so that he could face him dead on. “Yeah. Did the signing not give it away or?”

“You’re deaf,” Matt repeated again.

“Yeah, and that’s perfect actually, stay just like that. Can’t see you very well when you’re all twisted up the other way.”

Matt did not stay just like that because he obviously had something he needed to work through. Possibly homicidal urges. More likely embarrassment. Or actually, Brett was delighted to realize, it was having to tell Hawkeye, who he must have met before as Daredevil, that no, he was actually blind. For realsies blind. The cane was not a prop.

And he was gonna have to do it in the worst possible environment and karma was really fucking coming through for Brett over here.

“You need a minute, counselor? Or do you need me to help you interpret?” he asked.

Matt smashed a fist against his lips as he tried to work out how to make this happen without ruining all their lives forever.

He nodded mutely.

Brett made sure to get Hawkeye’s attention before explaining that he was going to step away for just a second. Hawkeye told him that that was no problem. He was a pretty amiable guy once he could figure out what you were saying, it turned out. Brett made a mental note to apologize when he got back.

He knew when it was safe to return because Hawkeye said, “NO FUCKING WAY,” loud enough that Brett heard it from where he was lingering around the captain’s office.

He soon found himself sitting between the most awkward humans on the face of the earth writing up a report while Matt occasionally grabbed at Hawkeye’s arm and tried to find his face to talk to him.

“Why did you hit the guy, Barton?” Brett asked.

“Oh,” Barton said, “He beat the shit out of Hawkeye.”

What.

“He beat the shit out of you,” Brett repeated.

“No, Hawkeye.”

Oh hell no, not this shit again.

“The…other Hawkeye then?”

Barton was pleased that Brett understood and nodded at him with a wide grin.

“The girl?” Matt asked him.

“Hm?”

Matt held his hand at about shoulder height.

“Oh, yeah. That’s her.”

Brett wrote this down on the amended statement.

“Can you describe her for me?”

“I mean, no.”

Brett blinked at the paper in front of him and then looked up to make sure he’d heard right. Matt was equally puzzled.

“Why not?” Brett asked for both of them.

“’Cause she’s a minor and I ain’t stupid.”

Jesus Christ. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Brett couldn’t have two minors running around in spandex right now. He just—for the sake of his blood pressure, he couldn’t.

“Was she with you at the time of this altercation?” he asked, deciding to shelve those feelings for now.

“Uh, yeah. But I sent her home.”

Why, man, _why_ would you send the primary witness home?

“Like I said, she’s a minor and I ain’t that fucking dumb.”

“Is she related to you?” Brett asked.

“No.”

Of course not, it could never have been that easy.

“Were you under the impression that this man might do significant harm to your partner?” Matt asked in his ‘gotcha’ way because he was still a snake under all those fancy clothes.

“Well, yeah. I like my knuckles how they are, you know? They just fuckin’ healed from my last job. This guy, though, he’s with the Russians—you know the Russians? C’mon, you know the Russians—anyways, he comes in here out of nowhere and starts whaling on the kid and my fuckin’ dog in the middle of the goddamned street. So I had to get in there, you know? Well, no. That ain’t fair, coulda let K— _Hawkeye_ sort it out herself, but you know young ‘uns. They never know when they’re in too deep. She’s all bruised up, by the way. He got her right here,” he thumped a fist into the middle of his chest, “And right here,” he thumped one side of his ribs, “And then that jackass put a boot into her _and_ my damn dog. You seen my dog? Shit, man, poor fucker’s already lost an eye. He didn’t even see it coming, that piece of shit.” 

100% agreed. Any man who beat up on animals was a piece of shit in Brett’s humble opinion.

Also, that was about everything he needed to hear, this was a self-defense case if he’d ever heard one. Hallelujah. Praise be.

“Alright, Mr. Barton. I think that’s what we need for now. Is there anything else you’d like to say? If not, I’m gonna need you to sign this statement and then I’m gonna talk to some witnesses and we’ll see where this needs to go from here, okay?” he said.

“Oh yeah, for sure. Whatever you want. Just one thing, can someone get me a hearing aid?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Aw, that’s great. Thanks, man. You’re a doll.”

A doll.

That sounded awfully like a formerly missing, currently un-missing super spy Brett now knew.

God, imagine the two of those assholes together.

Or not. For the sake of his blood pressure.

Barton got to go home and Brett quickly decided that the munchkin girl with bandages on her face who tackled him and shocked the crap out of Matt as soon as they exited the door had to be Hawkeye the younger.

She was about shoulder height with black hair in a pony tail and _so fucking young_ , dear god. Where had all these children come from? Where did they think they were going?

He was interrupted from this programing by the horrible realization that this girl and Peter probably knew each other.

God.

What if there was a whole troop of them?

Oh fuck, what if there was a whole troop of them??

“Peter,” he negotiated, trying not to let on too strongly that he was about to pump the kid for information.

Peter was smarter than that.

“No. I don’t know nothing.”

Damnit.

“Anything,” he corrected out of reflex. “But not the point, just one question—”

“No.”

“Nothing to do with whatever…whoever you’re hunting right now, I promise.”

Peter’s suit eyes squinted at him.

“No.”

Ugh. Fucking teenagers.

He sighed and dug his hands into his coat pockets and Peter stayed squinting at him for a few more seconds before returning to his city watching.

They all seemed to do this. Brett didn’t know what the fuck vigilantes saw from up high that no one else did, but they all really seemed into getting up there. He thought maybe it had to do with some kind of god complex. Maybe they liked to imagine that they had control over the city if they were literally above everyone else in it.

He couldn’t think of any other reason why someone who was blind like Matt would do that kind of thing.

Peter’s whole body changed when he spotted something down below. What was it? Hard to say. Brett had seen Pete have the same reaction to seeing an especially good dog at a café from above.

He was gone.

Must not have been a dog then.

Clint Barton lived down south in Bed Stuy in a shitty, shitty, _shitty_ condominium and he was literally holding the entire pot of coffee in his hand when he answered Brett’s knock on his door.

He wasn’t holding it like he was gonna pour anything anywhere.

Brett chose to let this man make whatever bad decisions he was going to.

“Mr. Barton, my name is detective Mahoney, we spoke at my station last week after—”

“Yeah, I remember you.”

Ah. Hearing aids in, then.

“I have a few questions I’d like to ask you if you don’t mind, sir,” he said.

Barton stared at him for another couple seconds, then shook himself and looked behind him, probably at the state of his home. He looked back at Brett with guilt written all over his face.

“So, there might be some slightly illegal weapons in here,” he said.

No. Brett did not want to know.

“I might be too distracted with our conversation to notice them,” Brett offered. Hawkeye sighed in relief.

“Thank Jesus, yeah. Come on in, uh. Careful of the dog, he’s grounded for eating people’s trash again.”

Clint Barton was the owner of this condominium. The owner. As in, the landlord. As in.

What.

“Yeah, I had an inheritance from my uh, relative, and I’m a dumb piece of shit and very bad at letting people tell me what to do.”

There were more questions than answers in that statement, sir.

There was a bow, _the_ bow, hung on the wall. It was a much taller and, surprisingly plainer, version of the one Amos had begged his mom for for his last birthday. The bow was overshadowed by the shitload of guns scattered haphazardly all over the living room’s coffee table and floor.

Barton sheepishly piled the ones on the couch into a wooden crate as if that made them any less fucking suspicious and invited Brett to have a seat.

“I’m sorry, man. I gotta ask,” Brett blurted out.

“They’re not mine,” Hawkeye blurted right back. “All of them anyways. JB—”

Brett fucking knew it.

“—got a hold of some old shit and we’re trying to figure out if they’re salvageable.”

He. He needed not to pursue that line of inquiry right now. For his sanity, if nothing else.

Barton offered him a cup of coffee. He made sure to specify that it was shitty coffee, although he seemed to think that this was praise for the liquid in the pot.

Brett politely refused. Barton either didn’t notice or didn’t care and started opening his cabinets to make a new pot.

“Mr. Barton—”

“Fuck, no. Call me Clint.”

Uh. How about no.

“Mr. Barton, you’ll forgive me if I sound ignorant, but I’m a little concerned about your uh, partner?”

Barton poured water into the angry pot and pressed the button on the machine.

“Katie-Kate?” he asked without turning around. “Yeah, no worries. I’m worried about her, too. She’s out there getting ideas in her head.”

Oh? What kind of ideas?

“Ones where she thinks she’s invincible. Dumb shit like that.” Barton sighed and leaned his back against his counter. “Only a matter of time before she goes off on her own.”

Yeah, that was exactly what Brett was afraid of.

“How old is Kate?” he asked.

“Seventeen. Eighteen before you know it.”

Shit.

One of the piles of guns by the radiator shifted at the gurgling of the coffee pot and a dog emerged from the wreckage to shake itself off and trot happily up to Barton. He stared down at it irritably. It wagged its shaggy tail.

“There’s not so many, detective,” Barton said, anticipating Brett’s next question and reaching down finally to pet the dog’s head. “Not as many as you think. I know all us super-vigilante-whatevers seem like fuckheads, but a lot of that’s just for show. It’s easy to convince people you’re stupid and get away with it.”

Brett wasn’t entirely convinced, but it was exactly what he’d wanted to hear.

“Spiderman’s pretty young,” he noted. Barton scoffed.

“Yeah, fuckin’ Stark’s over there, always calling me irresponsible, then turns around and picks up a fucking baby. Rude as hell if you ask me.”

Barton had a bit of an accent. A mid-western kind of thing. Brett wondered if he was aware of it.

“What happens when Kate strikes out on her own?” he asked gently. Barton kept petting the dog and shrugged.

“She’ll do whatever the fuck she wants to do, I guess. Can’t hold ‘em down once they get ideas in their heads. She’s been talking about going out west. She’ll all pretending to me it’s got nothing to do with her little girlfriend out there, which is horseshit to like, anybody with eyes. Or ears. Or hell, a functioning brain. But Spidey’ll be holy hell in a few years here, too, I guarantee you. Him and Stark are rocketing towards an ultimatum if you ask me.”

Brett hadn’t heard any of this before. Matt certainly hadn’t let on that there was conflict between Peter and Stark. You wouldn’t know it, watching the two of them interact.

“Yeah, no, man. Stark’s trying to get Spidey to join the Avengers and baby boy’s got a fuckin’ head on his shoulders and knows better than the rest of us that that’s a suicide mission.”

No shit?

“No shit. I tried to call out a few times and you just get sucked back in, man. It’s a sinkhole like that. Steve’s been trying to give up his mantle for _years_ now.”

This was news that Amos could not hear, ever, in his entire life, as far as Brett was concerned. He didn’t know how he felt now that he knew it.

“Like, for forever?” he pressed. Barton must have read the uncertainty on him because he backtracked.

“No, no,” he lied like a body in a gutter, “Not like that. It’s not like that. Cap loves being Cap. Obviously. He’s just, uh.”

“Tired,” Brett offered, remembering Cap’s tension in his own house. Barton sighed through his teeth.

“Broken,” he admitted. “We’re all fucked up, but Cap’s just fuckin’ done. Sam’s gonn—no. Sorry. Sorry, I can’t tell you anymore. Anyways, no, the kids are alright. They either outgrow the job and move on or they get to the point where they don’t need us old folks anymore.”

Did he just say what Brett thought he did?

Did he just—was Sam Wilson set to take over for Cap?

Barton was clearly trying to change the subject and Brett’s heart was really loud in his ears, so he decided to gently lay that news aside for now.

“How many more are there, do you know?” he asked.

Barton was relieved.

“No, I don’t. They pop up like daisies, go down like nails. You’re not gonna find them detective, and no one can protect ‘em the way we all wish we could. Here, I’ll introduce you to—”

The dog lost its damn mind.

“Kate,” Hawkeye said over the ruckus. The front door opened and the dog was immediately showered with affection by Hawkeye the younger with a similar bow to the one on the wall strapped over her shoulder with a backpack full of arrows.

She looked up and snapped to attention immediately upon seeing Brett on the couch.

“I know nothing,” she announced to the room.

Oh, good. The indoctrination started early.

“Kate, this is—” Barton started.

“I KNOW NOTHING.”

“—Detective Mahoney—”

“Haven’t seen anything.”

“He’s the cop Dare—”

“Haven’t heard anything.”

“—devil said is fine.”

“I’ve been at home all day, officer—wait, what?”

The bow slipped down over her shoulder. She was all in purple and had bandaids on her face like Barton. It kind of suited her.

“ _You’re_ the good detective?” she asked.

Aw.

That should not have been as heartwarming as it was.

“I try,” Brett told her. “We were just talking about you.”

Kate zipped right into a pout and stomped over to jab Hawkeye in the side with her fingers.

“You _said_ don’t talk to cops,” she snapped. He poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Brett, ignoring her. She followed him from the counter to the couch, getting in his way the whole time.

“You _said_ ,” she repeated. Barton took a boiling sip from his mug and made no motion to indicate just how much it hurt him.

Kate wasn’t having it. She turned on Brett.

“Did Spidey rat me out?” she demanded.

Oh. Interesting.

“Don’t know. Why do you ask?” he asked.

She pouted at him.

“Because he’s a goody-two-shoes snitch.”

Alright. For the notebook: Hawkeye the younger does not get on with Spidey. Possibly does not get on with Hawkeye the elder.

“No,” Brett assured her, “Foggy Nelson told me about you. I just wanted to make sure you’re alright and that you’ve got someone to come to if you need it.”

The girl eased up. Didn’t ease up entirely, but gave enough that she wasn’t visibly prickly anymore.

“I like Mr. Nelson,” she informed him.

Yeah, no shit. They all did.

“Foggy and I go way back,” he said, standing. “If you ever need anything from the NYPD, you can come to me first and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve got to be leaving now, though. Got to get home. Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Barton.”

The honorific made Barton flinch and Kate light up like Christmas. The second Brett left he knew that there was going to be hell to pay.

“Thanks for stopping by, detective,” Barton managed to say, “And uh, ignoring all the uh, illegality.”

No problem, pal. You have bigger fish to fry.


	9. coffee and illict resin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not scared of him.”   
> “Who are you trying to convince, pal? Me or you?”   
> Matt’s face hardened and he twisted his body to exit this conversation.   
> “I’m not scared of him and he’s not going to make me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW hi. 
> 
> References to sexual assault, rape, and general violence ahead. It's a little darker than usual, not gonna lie. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

Peter was sleeping in the hollow space under an old metal staircase in the rain.

Brett didn’t like that. He especially didn’t like that the kid didn’t move when the flashlight hit him.

They hadn’t gone out looking for Spiderman, he and Ellen, they were looking for a body. One, not two.

Peter was all crunched up in there, facing away from them, had probably ducked under to escape the rain. It was really coming down. Brett hadn’t noticed him mind the rain before, but it wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d gotten frustrated with getting slapped in the face with wave after wave of water.

He must have ducked under and fallen asleep. That had to be it. He must have been really tired to lose track of time like that. It was nearly four in the morning. Peter generally didn’t stay out past two or three.

The closest part of the kid to Brett was an ankle, wrapped in red and in desperate need of feeding. He reached between the metal steps and gave it a little shake.

Peter didn’t respond.

He got another shake.

Then Ellen tried his knee, having smaller hands than Brett, which more easily slipped between the stairs.

And then panic set in because Peter didn’t move. Didn’t wake up. Didn’t so much as flinch or grumble. Whatever he was up to under those stairs, it wasn’t sleeping. Brett and Ellen exchanged looks and then set to trying to find how the kid got into his little hollow in order to expedite his imminent exit from it.

They had to shove past a load of trash and crates to find the beams holding the stairs up and only then did it become obvious that little Peter was bleeding. The arm he’d rested his head on was soaked through with blood dribbling from his mouth and nose. Something was wrong with the suit. It hung off him like a second skin, pooling around his body like it was too tired to stay up.

The flashlight didn’t do him any favors, bleaching the red fabric into white and the blood into black.

Once he squeezed through the beams, Brett knelt down and had to dig through the suit material to find the boy’s neck. It was ghostly pale at first, bleached out by the flashlight. Then, as Brett got in closer, he saw that it wasn’t all that pale.

It was red. Red from the top of his throat to the clavicle.

He was wheezing softly.

Brett was sorry because whatever had happened, he knew that neck was only the tip of the iceberg and he couldn’t leave Peter to sleep it off outside, healing factor or no. Ellen helped him roll the kid into his arms and navigate the beams on the way out.

Peter went to Queens. Brett didn’t know where he lived, but he knew it was Queens and he knew that Peter couldn’t be seen by anyone else before he got home. Ellen found his phone. They’d gotten lucky. Peter had it in one of his hands, any lighter of a grip and he’d have dropped it back at the stairs and they’d have had their hands full of kid with nowhere to go.

As it were, they now had a phone and Peter’s thumb and Ellen found herself immediately on the contact page.

Peter had a lot of contacts. It took some scrolling to find May Parker’s number. She answered on the third ring and her voice shook as she gave them her address.

Peter’s room was cozy. His home was cozy. The Parkers were nesters. May must have tidied a bit in her anxiety, as everything was stacked up neatly in the front room and Peter’s bed had a dark sheet thrown on top of the covers. May was a smart woman, an experienced gal. She knew this game. She knew there would be blood and who knew what else.

Peter didn’t wake up when Brett laid him on the bed. He didn’t wake up when May pulled his mask off the rest of the way and started checking for broken bones.

He woke up to vomit.

Then groan. Recognize his aunt through bleary, half-closed eyes, and start hiccupping a little bit, reaching for her.

She wiped his face and pulled him up into a hug to keep him out of the puke on the bed.

She held him there, shushing him, and balled the sheet up.

May Parker was a professional. She felt along her nephew’s head and had a trashcan at the ready the next time the kid puked. She tucked him close and told him that she wanted him to lay very, very still and help her get him out of the suit.

Brett and Ellen helped. It didn’t take much, the suit was still loose.

Peter’s chest looked okay, but his side was almost iridescent with purple and blue. He whined for his aunt and tucked his face into her neck when she came back to try to help him into a clean shirt. It was an old habit, Brett suspected. One learned from early childhood.

Peter didn’t debate going to the hospital like Brett expected him to. He couldn’t stand up without having vertigo. He couldn’t keep anything down. He was still wheezing through the swelling on his neck. In his throat.

May asked Brett if he thought she needed to call 911 or if she could just take him to the hospital herself. Brett didn’t think the Parkers had a car, and he didn’t know if uber was the best course of action for a kid with a concussion.

He put them in his car.

The story was that Peter had been assaulted. Mugged on his way home from messing around in Harlem. He didn’t have much to do with this story, given that it was taking all his focus to stay conscious. He didn’t seem to recognize Brett very well, only wanted his aunt. She held his hand and called all the nurses in the ER by first name.

She worked there in the ICU.

Peter’s doctor insisted that pictures were taken. He was concerned about Peter’s side, concerned about bruising and swelling in the muscle and possibly the organs. Peter was too far gone to answer his questions. He’d gotten quiet and pliant and obedient, which, in Brett’s experience, meant that he was either exhausted or scared.

He was learning from Matt how to turn pain into fury, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

If Matt knew what had happened, he’d be doing that just now.

May Parker thanked Brett and Ellen for finding her kid, then said that she was going to go with him to have some scans done now. She said that she didn’t know who might have done that to him, but as soon as he was awake and functional, she’d call them so that they could get the ball rolling on the case.

She didn’t call.

If Amos one day woke up and decided that he was going to go out and fight crime, Brett would have duct-taped him to a chair. Then he’d have gone out to find the bastard who put those ideas in the kid’s head and given them a piece of his mind.

But Brett was comforted by the knowledge that Amos wouldn’t do that. Amos was a good, quiet, shy kid who was, on a good day, terrified of everything.

He wasn’t about to go jumping off buildings or fighting bad guys. It wasn’t in his nature.

“That’s how Peter used to be,” May sighed, running fingers through the kid’s hair as he slept on the couch in their living room. “I don’t know when it changed. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

She didn’t know who had done it. She said Peter wasn’t coherent enough to tell her yet. She said she’d called their friendly, family lawyer to look into it.

From a legal standpoint, obviously.

“Fisk,” Matt informed him. He’d taken Peter’s favorite perch over Queens. Had come all the way out of the Kitchen to hold the fort for the kid. Brett wondered if they ever traded suits.

“What’s he got to do with Peter?” he asked.

“Not sure. Gimme a few days to find out.”

And he would find out. Matt had a scarily extensive network of informants throughout the city. Even though he stayed in the Kitchen, he seemed to always know what was going on around town, block, and borough.

Matt held Peter’s fort for the two days it took for Pete to get back up on his feet. Then, like smoke, the two of them vanished off Brett’s radar again.

Hawkeye came all the way from Brooklyn with his arm in a cast to tell Brett to watch his fucking back, man. Wilson Fisk was out on the prowl. He was looking to hire a guy and allegedly had an offer no one could refuse. Rather, an offer no one with a decent head on their shoulders would refuse.

Luckily for Brett, neither Pete nor Barton had a decent head on their shoulders.

“He’s trying to woo Daredevil,” Barton told him, cutting pancakes one-handedly in the greasy spoon he demanded Brett meet him at.

“Woo?” Brett repeated. “With what? Coffee? Long walks on the beach?”

Barton snorted.

“Not sure. Red’s mad about it, though. He’s been running around through the whole city as of late.”

Interesting. In a very bad way.

“Does Deadpool know about what happened to Peter?”

The chances of Wade standing for that shit were next to nothing. Barton shrugged, then winced as the movement sent pain down his arm.

“He probably does now. Folks are talkin’.”

“In what way?”

“They don’t like Fisk putting his hands on one of the little ones. Hell, if he’d done that to Katie-Kate, you bet your ass I’d mount his on my wall.”

“His…ass?”

“You heard me.”

Lovely.

Matt was uncomfortable, Brett realized. Foggy didn’t say anything—no one had to say anything because everyone else was saying it for them.

The power of talk would always astound him.

“Daredevil’s been getting chased out of the Kitchen lately,” Brett heard at the barber’s.

“Boy never runs scared. Must be something big chasing after him.”

“Maybe. My guy saw him the other night. Guy was fuckin’ gunnin’ it, man. He must have been some kind of track star before all this.”

“Daredevil the track star.”

“Saw that guy take a bullet once, you know that? Didn’t move for a bullet, but he’s off running now? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, well,” a new voice chimed in from the center chair, “My girl says she knows that walk. Says it’s a ‘stranger danger’ walk, every gal knows that walk. She thinks someone’s trying to get in his pants.”

“Well, they’re gonna need some fuckin’ Vaseline or something to get those things off him. Boy probably paints those clothes on at night.”

Wait.

Was Fisk literally trying to woo Matt?

Did he not know that Matt and Fogs were together? Or maybe he did? Maybe this was on purpose? Was he threatening Fogs?

There was a crash and a scuffle right outside Brett’s mama’s house at 11 o’clock at night. His mom called him and said whoever it was, was still scuffling around out there and she was worried someone was hurt.

Someone wasn’t hurt.

But it was a close thing.

The other guy beat it, his hands drenched in the blood from his nose, before Brett could get a good look at him. Matt slumped against the wall in front of him in relief. There was blood on his face, on his lip. He spat it out and pushed himself off the wall.

He apologized to Brett for scaring his mom, and then he jumped up to catch the edge of a fire escape.

His hands slipped. He tried again and slipped.

He was shaken. Matt was shaken. Scared. Whatever that guy had been doing, or trying to do, it was on Matt’s no-go list.

“Hey, let’s call it quits for the night,” Brett told him gently. “Let me take you home, pal.”

Matt spat again and crouched low. He caught the fire escape this time and pulled himself up for just long enough to take the leap to the next one. He didn’t look back. Didn’t answer either.

Brett could put those pieces together.

“Fogs, Fisk is hiring people to try to rape your boy,” Brett told him, having dragged him down the block and out of ear-shot of said boy the next day.

The lines in Foggy’s forehead deepened and the twitch of his lips said that he knew. He knew and he didn’t want to have this discussion with Brett.

“Man, this is not fucking okay,” Brett snapped, “He tell you he could handle this? Because he cannot handle this. Not by himself anyways. Fogs, c’mon man. What can I do? How can we help?”

Foggy didn’t want to say, he stared at Brett from under his brow when he didn’t want to say.

“Foggy—”

“Brett, I fucking know. I just don’t know what the fuck to do, alright? He doesn’t know what to do--no one knows what to do. We’re not avoiding this, we just have no fucking idea where to go from here, so if you have any helpful suggestions, I’m all ears, pal.”

Well, uh. Wait, no.

Or maybe.

Uh.

“See? _See?_ It’s not that easy—it’s never that easy. No one’s gotten close enough to do anything yet, Matt can’t report it, he can’t describe them, and it’s a different guy every fucking time. What are we supposed to do? Say that every night a different random guy tries to fuck my partner while he’s out in the streets? What are you guys supposed to do with that, Brett?”

Fuck.

“Yeah.”

_Fuck._

“Yeah.”

Wade Wilson took over one of Matt’s perches in Hell’s Kitchen. Brett still didn’t know where Peter was. Hell, at this point, he didn’t even know where Matt was. Hopefully somewhere safe. Hopefully with someone safe.

He wondered if he could get Matt drunk enough to be disorderly, so he could throw him in a cell for a little while and keep as many eyes on him as possible.

That relied on two premises, however. The first being that Matt was an angry drunk and the second being that he wasn’t a violent one. No one was moving Daredevil an inch if he didn’t allow it to happen.

Unless you were Wilson Fisk, apparently.

Wade Wilson inspired a different kind of vibe over the city. Some people who saw him up there thought Daredevil had come back, and wow, he’d really bulked out, hadn’t he? Others knew exactly who that was up there and hurried to get the fuck out and stay the fuck out of his sightlines.

He sat way up there over the old church and kicked his feet. Waiting patiently, infuriatingly patiently, for someone to try their luck. He stayed up there. Was up there every time Brett looked.

Hell’s Kitchen was damn near silent that night. Not a single call into the station about a violent crime. One call about a missing kid came in, in which the parent trailed off and suddenly announced that their kid was no longer missing.

Deadpool ruled with an iron fist. And even a place like Hell’s Kitchen had enough sense not to fuck with that.

He’d be a good guy if he chose to be, Wade Wilson. And that only made him more terrifying.

Matt was guarding Queens, it turned out, because Peter was doing something complicated which Matt could not describe. He made several attempts to for Brett’s benefit, but got himself all caught up in the explanation, so that it wasn’t so much an explanation as much as it was a game of twenty questions.

“And I think there’s something science-y involved?”

Science-y.

“Yeah, I think. He said something that sounded like science and Wade agreed and I didn’t want to look like a liberal arts idiot, so I said sure, but now I’m not so sure I should have. Do you think I should have?”

What, agreed to something you don’t even understand, Matthew? You’re asking me if you should have agreed with that?

“See, when you say it like that, it seems so easy.”

Brett sighed.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Matt fidgeted for half a second, then shrugged casually, as if he had not been profoundly disturbed and distressed over the last few weeks.

“I’m fine, it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Right, that’s why you traded with Wade Wilson.

“Wade said he wanted to watch for a few nights. I didn’t trade with him.”

Oh, buddy. Have you ever heard of kindness?

“He said things have been okay. So that’s good. That’s more than I can do right now with all these assholes chasing me around.”

“Matt, you’re allowed to be scared,” Brett told him, “This is scary. Really, really scary.”

Matt went still. Then melted.

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Fisk?”

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Who are you trying to convince, pal? Me or you?”

Matt’s face hardened and he twisted his body to exit this conversation.

“I’m not scared of him and he’s not going to make me.”

Brett had expanded his knowledge of vigilantes significantly over the last couple months, but what he had not expanded was his understanding or ability to predict what the fuck these guys were about to do at any given time.

Peter, for example, he would not have pinned as an arsonist.

Although, now, thinking about it, it absolutely made sense.

Fisk wasn’t hurt, but his collection of documents and presumably, his alibis, had sure taken a hit.

Peter returned to Queens. Matt returned to Hell’s Kitchen. Wade returned to wherever the hell he went when he was pretending to be a person again.

Brett was pretty sure that that had been an act of war. He shuddered to think about what the next one might be.

It was breaking Peter’s limbs. Then it was siccing a huge gang of folks on Matt. Then it was trying to suffocate Peter with his own web.

And then, to Brett’s surprise, Matt and Peter came together to start hitting back. But not in the way Brett expected.

Peter showed up one day at the station and told him not to panic, but he’d gotten Fisk to hire him on as one of his lackeys, and oh, by the way, he needed to know some stuff about DNA, could Brett introduce him to one of the forensics people?

WHAT.

“Peter.” He needed to be calm otherwise Peter would remember that he was a genius monster-child and could learn that shit on his own if he really committed to it, “I am having strong negative emotions about what you’ve just told me because I’m concerned that it is going to put you in extreme danger.”

Peter blinked up at him.

“Kay, so is that a ‘no’ on the forensic expert, or?”

This fucking kid.

“That is a no,” Brett snapped, “What in God’s name are you doing?”

Peter seemed to stop blinking.

“We’re gonna get Fisk to try to hurt Double D.”

What. The fuck.

“Okay, so, with the full understanding that I, as a police officer, have heard and approve of _none_ of this plan: why the hell are you doing that?”

“Because if Fisk hurts Double D when he’s not Double D, then he says he can do a lot more about it.”

How about no? How about let’s not put our lives in immediate danger? How about there has to be another way to do this?

“Well, Double D says that sometimes you’ve got to play the long con and he’s got a good idea for one that I don’t totally understand, but he’s pretty confident, so I’m going with it.”

Did these two know that neither of them made any sense to the other? Because it was sounding more and more to Brett like they all just ran on blind faith over there.

“Matt made this plan,” he clarified. Peter nodded. “Does Foggy know about this plan?” Peter shook his head. “What happens if Foggy knows about this plan?”

“He’s probably gonna freak.”

Uh-huh. That’s about what he expected.

“And now I’m sworn to secrecy?”

Peter lit up and gave him a huge smile.

Matt was teaching him how to use all them fucking teeth. He was going to murder that man. Murder him and bury him in a graveyard so no one would ever find him.

“Detective, you’re getting so good at this.”

“Whatever. Move along, kid.”

Peter saluted him and bounced off.

They were both going to die. Brett needed to start writing condolence letters now.

Brett didn’t know what the hell Peter did, but Fisk charged Matt on the street with his bare hands at five in the evening three days later, and both of them fell right through a liquor store window. Fisk tried to stab Matt with a piece of glass he yanked out of the store front window he’d shattered.

Matt sat back and protected his face and neck the best he could for as long as he could. He played innocent blind man so well it made Brett’s teeth hurt. He let that fucker stab him in the side, hard enough to nick his lung, although he did manage to do a number on Fisk’s nose and balls.

As the finishing touch, he pulled out some horrified crocodile tears for the witnesses and cops and paramedics when they got to the scene and allowed himself to be taken to the hospital by ambulance in the most un-Matthew Murdock-like move of the century.

Fisk was taken into custody and released shortly after because he was Wilson Fisk and there is no justice in the world.

But Fisk had fucked up, Brett came to learn, when Peter wriggled under his arm while he was buying lunch and asked him if he knew anyone at social services.

Brett did not like or trust any of the questions that came out of Peter’s body anymore.

“I know no one and nothing,” he said.

Peter hummed and fucked off just as fast as he’d appeared.

Brett called Foggy because he could no longer keep this shit to himself.

“Man, Matt’s up to something,” he said, “And I know he’s your boyfriend and shit, but Fogs he’s gonna get himself killed.”

Foggy sounded bored on the other side of the line.

“What else is new?”

What--

Who--

 _Why_ were all these people like this??

“He’s gonna—”

“Get himself killed? Wow. It’s almost as if he hasn’t already tried that this month. Actually, my bad, as if he doesn’t try that every day of the year, Brett. I’ve had it. I honestly don’t care anymore. All the worrying and fighting and ‘you’re wrong, I’m right’ shit is just giving me ulcers. Whatever he’s doing, he’s gonna do it. If he doesn’t want to tell me, he obviously already knows what I think about it.”

“How the fuck are you so calm about this?”

“This is my life now, man. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. And if he thinks that that’s gonna get Fisk out of his life for the time being, then all power to him. Anyways, there’s nothing anyone else can do for him right now, may as well let him feel at least some control over the whole thing.”

Brett didn’t know what to say anymore, so he said ‘okay,’ and he said ‘bye’ and that was it.

Peter and Matt were brilliant little fuckers who had no right being as fucking reckless and stupid and brilliant as they were.

Peter convinced May to convince her friends in the ER to report Matt’s myriad of old injuries to social services. Matt got Foggy to do so as well. Then he asked Sister Maggie at church to do it.

Social services said that they were sending out a social worker to check on him.

Peter reported to Fisk that social services was sending someone out and maybe hinted that it would be a good opportunity to put an end to Matt Murdock once and for all. After all, once Matt was good and strangled, social services would be too embarrassed to admit one of their own had done the deed and so would do their best to cover everything up. That meant that Fisk’s hand in the ploy would go unnoticed, hidden away by the state itself.

Fisk, who was also a mastermind at these types of things, respected Peter’s ingenuity and put him in charge of swapping the state social worker for one of his own people. Peter took the job, then offered it up to the load of scumbags he was now in charge of. Two guys volunteered to do the old switcheroo, and after roughing up the first, sent the new ‘social worker’ on their merry way into Matt’s living room.

Matt played poor blind man again and let the gal into his house, where she attempted to put his lights out and he attempted to make as much noise and humanly possible. The neighbors called the police.

The police walked in on Fisk’s gal with her hands wrapped up in one of Matt’s belts, which in turn, was wrapped around his neck. The gal went to the station and had second thoughts about her employer once her lawyer arrived. She told Maynard who had paid her to do the job. She said that two guys had chased the real social worker away at gunpoint.

Brett found himself sitting stupefied as the gal basically admitted that Fisk had commissioned a murder and second degree assault by injuring a social worker to prevent her from carrying out her duties.

It was unbelievably well-thought out. Better thought-out than Brett had thought either Matt or Peter capable of.

He found himself sincerely glad that those two were technically on the same side as the police.

“Okay, I have something I need to say,” Brett said a week or so later to his now very pleased, temporarily Fisk-less acquaintances. He’d brought the two of them their favorites, coffee and illicit resin, and was in luck enough to find them both on the same perch at the very edge of Hell’s Kitchen, waiting for Wade Wilson to return from a job to join theirs.

Matt and Peter were well bored of him already. It was almost a useless endeavor to get either of them to focus on this point, what with Peter describing, in detail, Fisk’s face when he realized that it had been the two of them who’d engineered the whole thing from the start.

Peter’s Fisk-impression was stunningly awful. It made Matt laugh so hard he couldn’t breathe, his recent near-asphyxiation notwithstanding.

Matt followed this with an equally awful explanation of all the smells he’d encountered in the court room during the first hearing.

Brett cleared his throat and the two of them returned their attention to him.

“I just—I wanted to say apologize,” he said, “I’m sorry that we couldn’t do anything for you two, as civilians. I’m sorry that you suffered and we had no way of alleviating it. I’m sorry that I had no options for you. That’s my job, and I failed at it. And then I thought you two were insane in what you were trying to do and didn’t believe in you, and I. Well. I was wrong. You guys are amazing. Thanks for getting that guy put away, even if it’s just for a little bit.”

Silence.

Peter looked to Matt for guidance in how to deal with this and Brett got the feeling that this was a first for him. It must have been a first for Matt too because he shrugged with his hands.

“You’re welcome?” he tried. Peter bobbed his head enthusiastically in agreement.

You’re welcome. That’s what he had. Even after all those years talking professionally.

Well, fuck it, alright, that was good enough. He nodded and turned to leave them to their dramatics.

“Hey, detective?”

He looked over his shoulder at Peter’s wide white suit eyes.

“Hm?”

“Thanks for caring.”

Aw.

“No, that’s a good point,” Matt agreed. “Thanks for giving enough of a shit to keep track of us. And for not telling anyone about anything.” He smirked. “You ought to be careful though, Mahoney, people are gonna start thinkin’ you like us.”

Dangerous territory indeed.

“Drink your damn coffee, Murdock. You both need an attitude adjustment.”

He could have sworn he heard Peter doing an impression of him as he left.


	10. lures on wires

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This new collection of overblown cat toys was then re-scrubbed with sand paper, burnt a little bit, and placed back in Brett’s hands along with instructions to go bury them beside a dumpster for a few hours.
> 
> “Fogs, what the fuck did we just do?” he asked once the deed had been done.
> 
> “You’ll see,” Fogs told him solemnly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi so this piece is hella old and I realized i'd kind of left this verse hanging for a bit, but hey. I dunno how to end it or if its even worth trying to end, so whatever. 
> 
> I don't like this chapter as much as some of the others but it's entertaining, so have some light entertainment. Basically, I wanted to see more vigilante games. As a note: if you don't know about The Tennis Ball, see my fic "on your marks" from the Dumpster Fires Verse.

Since his latest run-in with Hawkeye and Hawkeye, Brett had been thinking up an experiment. Something to get a better feel for the practical capabilities of his latest assemblage of trouble-makers. They were all very different people, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he felt like there was a certain kind of method to their madness: they all had some things in common which made them good at what they did.

Knowing what made vigilantes good vigilantes, the captain thought, when Brett happened to mention this experiment in the break room, could be very useful in locating, working with, and potentially dissuading up and coming vigilantes from their current course of action.

He approved. He told Brett to report his findings.

Brett was pretty sure that in order to get any real kind of findings, he was going to need to recruit the science guys at CUNY and Columbia. As such, he said that he would promise no findings, only observations.

The captain laid into him with a look and told him to report his observations then.

He had more faith in Brett than Brett had in himself, but that was basically an order, so now he really had to go through with it.

He decided that, for the sake of this first trial, he’d test two big, overarching themes he’d picked up on. The first test was an attention span test.

He’d noticed a trend with his resident vigilantes and supers and that was a stunning inability to focus on one thing for more than twenty seconds at a time. Nearly every one of the guys he bumped into shared a cat-like spectrum of attention; they leapt and skittered from hyper-fixation and playful attention to complete and utter boredom, disinterest, and dismissal.

Fogs corroborated this supposedly shared disposition and called it ‘capricious bitch syndrome’ outside the company of those involved. He was, however, willing to submit his beloved to be Brett’s first subject.

Subject acquired, the next thing to do was to find a complicated task which could accommodate multiple types of thinking patterns and, most importantly, focused attention.

He was going to get a Rubik’s cube or something but ran into the whole issue of certain folks being blind. He wondered if he could put braille stickers on the cube to deal with this. Fogs gave him a flat look when he opened the floor up for suggestions.

“Brett,” he said after a long moment of judgment, “You cannot actually believe that these guys will follow any direction you give them.”

A fair and valid point.

“Alright, then, Mr. Expert, what do _you_ propose I do instead?”

Fogs cocked an eyebrow.

Fogs took him to a pet store and purchased a series of tennis balls. Fogs then took him home to the hardware store and spent an hour destroying those tennis balls with sandpaper and mulch. He cut them cleanly in half so their hollows were exposed.

He handed Brett a bunch of cracked microchips and box of empty plastic balls which usually came out of quarter machines. 

“Water or glitter, it’s your choice,” he said.

Nothing made any fucking sense, but Fogs acted like he knew what he was about, so Brett picked water.

The chips were incased neatly in hot glue and dropped into the empty plastic toy balls, which were themselves then filled with water and carefully sealed with duct tape. Fogs dropped these into the waiting halves of the tennis balls, then heated the plastic on the sides and sealed those all back together so that they kind of sloshed and rattled when shaken.

This new collection of overblown cat toys was then re-scrubbed with sand paper, burnt a little bit, and placed back in Brett’s hands along with instructions to go bury them beside a dumpster for a few hours.

“Fogs, what the fuck did we just do?” he asked once the deed had been done.

“You’ll see,” Fogs told him solemnly.

Matt, when presented with one of the balls at the end of the day the next day as their office was closing up, just about lost his shit.

“I don’t think it’s that one, Matty,” Foggy clarified from where he was locking up one of the enormous filing cabinets behind their office manager’s desk.

Matt didn’t hear him. Matt was fucking stoked about this piece of shit dumpster ball.

He shook it and listened hard. Shook it again. Stared at it with huge eyes like it held the answers to the universe.

“I’m doing some tests,” Brett read from the mental script Fogs had texted him the night before, “Trying to figure out which one of y’all has the best reasoning ability.”

He now had Matt’s complete and undivided attention. His head snapped up and his body went frozen solid.

“Who else is playing?” he asked, dead serious. He did not relinquish the ball.

Not the reaction Brett was expecting, but okay, sure.

“Whoever I can get to sit still long enough to do it,” Brett told him. “Probably you, Spidey, Castle, Jones, Cage, the usual suspects.”

Matt’s face said that he now fully intended to win this motherfucking game, come hell or high water. He squeezed the tennis ball hard enough that his purple knuckles flexed.

“What are the rules?” he asked.

“Well, you’re going to tell me what’s in that,” Brett tapped a finger on the ball in his hand, “Without opening it. If you open it, you lose points.”

“You gonna time me?” Matt asked.

“Yes.”

“Fastest wins?”

“Yeah, you start with 600 points. You lose a point for every second you take. Minus 200 for opening the ball.”

“Fuck yes. Let’s go.”

Brett pulled out his timer and braced himself.

Matt wanted a count down. Brett thought that was reasonable.

3.

2.

1.

Go.

Matt pitched the damn thing at the wall hard enough that the plastic ball inside audibly cracked. The ball rocketed around the office, ricocheting off the walls until Matt leapt up and caught it in mid-air. Karen swore at him from her own office. He didn’t respond.

He shook the ball and listened hard, then glared at it. Rinse, wash, repeat. Two times.

Whatever he heard, he wasn’t satisfied with, so at 20 seconds he threw it again and nearly broke a window.

At 22 seconds he threw himself bodily under the frame of the mercifully unbroken glass after it.

At 03:05, Brett, Foggy, and an angry Karen relocated him in an alley a few blocks over hurling the poor thing harder and harder against a brick wall without giving it time to connect with any other object, which was fucking eerie in itself. He caught the ball every time without fail, somehow knowing its exact trajectory—almost as though he could see it.

At 03:15 seconds, he paused to catch and shake the ball right next to his ear.

“Rubber, thin plastic—like an ornament, one of those Christmas bauble-things, the kind with the fake snow in them. Maybe a plastic snowglobe? Soft plastic, too. Not sure what that is. For sure something metal. Small, porous. Thin, not thicker than the bauble plastic—much thinner. Like an SD card or something. How am I doing? There’s another thing, but I don’t know what it is. Some kind of fabric? It cushions it.”

That shit was fucking insane.

“You wanna try to guess what the fabric is?” Brett offered in a bit of awe.

Matt’s face said that he now considered this his make-it-or-break-it moment. He held the ball in cupped hands and bowed his head in stillness for a few long moments.

The timer ticked away.

04:07

04:08

“Is it some kind of tape?”

Damn.

04:10.

Still though, he was missing the obvious.

“Anything else you want to add? This is your last chance.”

Matt did a little distressed breathing and rattled the ball a little anxiously.

“Going once,” Brett said.

More rattling.

“Going twice.”

“Wait—wait. Is it? There’s—fuck. What is it? What _is_ it?”

C’mon, man. You can do it.

“WAIT NO HOLD ON—It’s the liquid! Water, some kind of water. Is it water?”

Brett cheered for him and it took Matt a second to realize what had happened before he joined in too. He then immediately wanted to know what his time was.

04:30.

Not bad at all. 330 points total. He was now the man to beat.

Peter was a little harder to find than usual because he was hiding from what he described as a ‘big fucker with mutton chops.’

Brett was not illuminated. But he was in a good position now because Pete was hiding low rather than high as was his usual preference. That put them on a flat roof in the Upper West Side and gave him a wide open space to conduct his experiment.

He produced the ball.

Peter did not look at him once while he explained he object of this game. Brett held the ball up higher and was gratified to see Pete follow it with his chin. His pale hands twitched where they poked out of his sweater.

“Matt did it in four and a half minutes,” Brett told him. Peter said nothing. His fingers flexed.

“You think you can do it faster?” he asked.

He got the barest of nods, so focused was the kid on his hands.

He kindly put the ball into those twitching hands. Peter held it like it was precious. He didn’t look up through the count-down either.

“Ready?”

A silent nod.

“Go.”

Where Matt’s first instinct had been to shatter the noise-maker to pick apart its contents, Peter’s first inclination was to check for seams on the tennis ball itself. He found them, then jerked his chin up to Brett.

“I lose points for opening it,” he clarified.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“200.”

“Out of how many?”

“600.”

“And Double D got?”

“330.”

Peter hummed.

“Kay,” he said absently.

Then ripped the thing right in half.

“Tennis ball, plastic globe, microchip, tape, some kind of—this saline or water?” he licked his fingers. “Water.” He picked up the microchip and peeled it out of its plastic prison. “Hot glue. What’s my time?”

45 seconds.

“Minus 200 for opening it,” Peter ruminated, doing the math. “That puts me at 355. So I win.”

Matt was going to have a fucking breakdown.

“Yeah, I guess you do.”

Brett found himself all over the city over the next week or so, pissing off and delighting the resident wildlife with the task. He had to hand it to Fogs, the man really knew his clientele.

There was only one incident which didn’t make the cut and that was Danny Rand chucking his ball at the dock and subsequently sacrificing it to the ocean gods. He was devastated.

Replacement of the ball costed another 200 points.

Boy was in the negatives by the time he’d gotten it open.

“I hate this game,” he declared loudly, after Jessica Jones asked who made the ball, and, based off her knowledge of Foggy and his background, guessed at least half the materials from the get-go before having to stoop to make the crack.

This people were fucking wild.

They scored along a huge spectrum, with some folks like Danny getting wrapped up in the excitement of the competition, and other folks, like Castle who asked no questions and smashed the thing from the start, purely to remove Brett from his doorstep.

Brett wasn’t entirely sure what he’d gotten from this test, but he could safely say now that if competition was involved, a good 80% of his new friends presented with keen, prolonged, and single-minded focus.

He found himself in the increasingly familiar dilemma of producing a list of results and a prize for the top three, however. The station was fascinated by these and suggested booze as the prize.

Peter had gotten second place to Castle’s first, however, and Brett was dead certain that booze would result in another polite (although probably much less polite) letter from Colonel Rhodes, so they had to think a little more creatively.

Castle was suspicious of receiving such a nice bottle of whiskey from a cop. He made Brett drink two fingers worth before he deemed it not poisoned and safe for consumption.

Peter received bragging rights and a small tub of something he was apparently not old enough to purchase on his own. Brett could not pronounce the chemical name taped on the tub’s exterior, but _technically_ it wasn’t resin. So as far as he was aware, it was fine. Peter accepted it and stuffed it down the front of his suit in a hurry before demanding that Brett keep him informed of all future tests.

Jessica, who’d also received bragging rights and who had immediately called Matt to exercise them, also requested to be kept in this loop. She thanked him flatly for the booze and returned to her den with the clack of a closed door.

That was an improvement. She’d never not slammed the door on Brett before.

The other test was an agility thing, a teamwork thing. A tracking game, if you will.

It wasn’t Fogs who made this one up, rather it was Wade Wilson of all people who requested it.

“I,” he’d forcibly dictated to Brett, who found himself scrawling this nonsense out in his notebook for later distribution, “Wade Wilson, officially declare, once and for all, that y’all are fucking weenies and _no one_ is a better tracker than me.”

Brett didn’t even need to work for that one. He barely got through half the statement before every party spoken to was in uproar. He had to bring the captain and other detectives in on this one because Fogs said that he wasn’t touching it with a ten foot pole and most of the other people’s associates shared the sentiment.

The station decided that the best ‘trackee’ would someone who was already impossible for they themselves to track down.

Frank Castle agreed and said he’d like to see someone just fucking try to catch him.

Brett made a note that they needed a whole team of psychologists to study this man.

The issue was now that Matt notoriously had a nose for Castle like no one else in the city. He would, without a doubt, find and try to maim Castle in twenty seconds or less and that would surely alert the others and give them the unfair advantage of just following him to the destination. They had to combat this.

“Okay,” Brett told his motley crew of over-excited, costumed sniffer dogs who had gathered for the occasion just outside Battery Park around sunset. “Who here has played Sardines?”

Every hand but two went up.

“Alright, well, for those of you who haven’t: unlike your usual game of tag or hide-and-seek, in Sardines, when you find your mark, you hide with them. Castle will record your time if you find him and when you do, it is your job to _stay with him._ So what are we going to do?”

There was a children’s chorus of ‘stay with him.’

“And what are we not gonna do?” he asked, wondering if he shouldn’t just hand in his badge now and apply for that position at the nursery around the corner from his mom’s.

“Murder him?” Matt’s voice piped up from the back.

“Intercept these other fucks?” Wilson offered from somewhere back there too.

Mental note, those two needed to be separated.

“Can we work together?” Rand asked.

Rand was shoved out to the side of the group and was declared an idiot by a trial of his peers.

Brett reminded them all that this was not a contact sport and that no, they were not allowed to work together or fight Castle at the end of the line. Matt asked what the fucking point was then and was shouted down like his compatriot.

Once they’d settled down a bit, it was dark enough to unleash the beasts.

Castle had hidden several hours earlier and had sent Brett a message from a random, probably highly secured, email account around six saying that he was in position and had no intention of being located any time soon, thanks.

Brett sent him a quick message on the spot and then stood back to the sidelines with the group of associates who had come along to watch the masses. He went to whistle, but Wilson got there first and fired a shot straight into the air and in a blink everyone was gone. Scattered to the winds.

Belatedly, Brett thought that maybe this was a bad idea.

The crowd of normals remaining migrated off towards the nearest subway station and then headed over to Karen’s apartment, where she had helpfully made Castle turn on his skype so that they could all witness the impending bombardment.

Castle was pretty blasé about this all. Wherever he was, it looked like a bunker and he waved to them all dismissively from his makeshift bed. Man had a highly suspicious collection of notebooks over there that Brett was 100% certain Homeland Security would be desperate to get their hands on.

Castle took the moment of quiet to glance their way and say,

“Gonna be a long wait, friends.”

It was.

Almost.

Fogs and Karen stopped their abysmal game of poker to cheer as the window above Castle on the screen jerked and shuddered open and Matt fell in, right into Castle’s lap.

It had only taken him an hour.

Brett had kind of anticipated that.

Castle shoved Matt off, but Matt, ever a stickler for not following the fucking rules, pounced on him and agitated him until Castle lost his patience and damn near choked him out. Matt, like a juvenile puppy, saw this as a challenge and fought hard until Castle sighed and let him go. He shoved him off the edge of the bed and attempted to go back to his researching.

That lasted maybe a minute at most before Matt pounced again—now having completely forgotten about the game. It quickly, and naturally became a cycle.

Bucky Barnes skidded into the room twenty minutes later, failed to anticipate the drop through the window, and landed right on top of the other two.

Steve and Sam booed him from the back of Karen’s living room.

He proved to be a good distraction for Matt, at least, to Castle’s relief.

“Sit down and shut up,” Barnes swore at him, after yanking him off Castle for the third time in ten minutes. “Papa’s gonna tell us a fucking story while the rest of these chumps get ready to fucking lose.”

Bucky Barnes ignored the skype audience in order to tell Matt a story about a World War II campaign which was almost certainly made up.

It was something insane about a time when the Howling Commandos had all gone hunting for a cigar so that Sergeant Dugan could take a picture with a French gal they’d met while looking like Winston Churchill.

Matt, having been forcefully placed on the floor by Castle’s bed in a cross-legged position across from Barnes’s own, kept interrupting to ask questions which set Barnes back in his story. He’d be making good headway, talking about how him and his scraggly, future patriotic icons had once found a bathtub, a box of peaches, and a rubber duck when Matt would ask something like ‘but wasn’t it winter? How could you find peaches in winter?”

“Well, they were canned.”

“Then why were they in a box?”

“How else do you move cans, asshole?”

“So you found a whole crate of canned peaches? In the French countryside? In winter?”

“What part of this is hard for you to understand, pal? Yeah, there were fucking canned peaches in the goddamned ice wasteland, alright? _Anyways_ —”

“But wouldn’t they have been rationed? Was fruit rationed?”

“Listen, you—”

“He has a point,” Castle chimed in. “Sounds fucking fake if you ask me.”

Barnes sneered at him and crossed his arms. The metal one glinted in the dim light on the screen.

“Fine, you wanna tell the story, big guy? You tell the fuckin’ story.”

Castle, to Brett’s surprise, stopped chicken pecking at his tablet and cocked an eyebrow back.

“I will,” he decided, then set the tablet aside and laid his chin into his palm. “I bet what _really_ happened is that y’all went out at night to some bombed out inn and found a _single_ can of peaches and a hunk of soap y’all decided looked kind of like a fuckin’ duck. And I bet you didn’t find a single cigar, so y’all smashed together a couple of cigs just so your buddy could take the damned picture. That’s what I think.”

Barnes huffed.

“Man, if you can’t turn a hunk of fuckin’ soap into a good story, I don’t know what to—”

Wilson crash-landed into home base and managed to miss Castle to take out Barnes with his momentum. Matt lit up.

“Wade, when you were a soldier, did you ever find a can of fruit?” he asked the writhing mass suffocating the most senior member of the troop.

Wilson, once extricated from Barnes and done being pissed off that he’d come in third place, hummed in thought, then lit up as well.

“Actually, now that you mention it, me and a couple buddies earned some lemons once.”

There was a long pause on the other side of the monitor. Castle leaned forward on his palm.

“Well, go on then,” he said, before waving dismissively at Barnes, “This guy’s trying to tell us he found a whole crate of peaches back in the good ole days.”

Wade addressed Barnes, gave him a good once-over and then said, “It was just one wasn’t it?”

Barnes threw his hands in the air.

“Y’all ain’t got no imagination, that’s what this is,” he declared.

There was a brief argument over the veracity of this statement which was ended by the swift arrival of Hawkeye the elder. He arrived only to the door of the little room with a disconcerting thud, but he _did_ manage to lodge his whole hand under the door, so, _technically_ he was in the room at the two hour mark, even though he was definitely stuck with no hope of savior. There was another brief, far too casual debate about whether or not to chop off his hand at the wrist.

Barnes relented eventually and opened the door into the guy’s face before congratulating him on attaining fourth place and dragging him in by the back of his shirt. He was dumped on the floor and the fruit question was posed to him as well.

“Nah man, I wasn’t around long enough to find any fruit,” Barton said, nursing his now-abused hand, “Found a whole lot of scrubbin’ though. Every officer in that place decided that what I needed was a good scrubbin’.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re a fuckin’ scrub,” Barnes observed.

“You don’t even know what a fuckin’ scrub is,” Barton snapped back.

Brett could not believe that this was the city’s first line of defense after hours.

“Do to.”

“Do not.”

“What’s a scrub?” Matt asked Wade and Castle who flinched back in shock.

“You not listen to music or something, Red?” Castle asked.

Matt made a gesture encompassing his entire being.

“Catholic school,” he said.

“I mean, yeah, but Catholics are allowed to listen to music, you know? I listened to music,” Castle pointed out.

“You’re Catholic in name only and anyways, I was like ten or something when that song came out.”

Silence in the auditorium. Followed by groaning and anguished writhing.

“Christ, I’m so fucking _old,_ ” Wade moaned.

That carried on for long enough for Matt get good and annoyed and demand to know where the fuck Danny or Kate or Peter was so he could be freed from this new burden of being the youngest person in the room.

His prayers were answered by Kate who cried out in triumph upon hearing their voices through the door and came into the room with her arms up for high-fives from her mentor. Barton celebrated with her and asked her to pardon the overflow of masculinity happening.

Jones was hot on her heels. And hot on _her_ heels was a handful of others.

Most everyone was in and fiercely debating scrubs by the three hour mark and that was coincidentally the same time they all realized that the only missing body was Spiderman.

Things got quiet. The room on both sides of the skype call settled down and waited.

And waited.

And waited?

Wade and Matt got antsy for their lost team member around hour four and eventually it was decided that Peter was going to be in last place anyways, so it was fine to call him and give him a hint.

Peter didn’t need a hint. He needed an army, they were informed over speaker phone.

“I know we’re supposed to be like, playing this game, but there’s like forty guys over here trying to break the Brooklyn Bridge in half and I think I’m kind of shot?” Peter gritted through his teeth over the phone.

The place was abandoned far quicker than it had been filled.

Brett’s observations, which found their way to the captain written out on a piece of computer paper the following Monday morning, were thus:

  1. Vigilantes have, on the whole, very strong reasoning and critical thinking skills. These skills are frequently augmented by their abilities and/or choice of career.
  2. Vigilantes are, on the whole, extremely proficient at tracking (especially each other). They are capable of finding a person within hours, even if provided with an extremely limited set of information at the start.
  3. Everything above may be magnified by the added element of competition.
  4. The Howling Commandos had, in fact, found a wax peach in France at one point during World War II [information obtained from Steve Rogers, 2 hours post-Brooklyn Bridge incident.]
  5. Bucky Barnes is a lying liar who lies and is currently being shunned by the greater vigilante community.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you don't know what a scrub is, you want to see Urban Dictionary and the song No Scrubs by TLC. Thank you and goodnight.


	11. go get you something nice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was prom season.  
> AKA Brett’s personal hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gotta buy a dress for my friend's wedding. Hence, this.

It was prom season.

AKA Brett’s personal hell.

People could prattle on about young love and archaic courtship rituals and rites of passage all they wanted, Brett would not be swayed. If these were the purposes of prom, then Brett’s cousin Sasha lived in a constant state of it on Instagram. And if he saw one more picture of her squatting in an alley, he was going to initiate a frank, cousin-ly discussion with her about where lots of folks went to die at night.

She wasn’t gonna like it. And he was just going to add fuel to the ‘killjoy cousin’ fire he had going on in extended family circles. (“Brett, be nice to your cousins; they’re young.” “You know what else they are, mom? Stupid.”)

The first client in his personal hell showed up that Wednesday. Brett dropped the file he’d been working on onto his desk and leaned his elbows on the other folders piled up there so that the young man sitting across from him would pay attention.

“Son,” he said slowly, “Do I look like I have time for this?”

The kid squirmed in his too big, be-flowered suit and ultimately dropped his gaze to his lap.

“You see all these files?” Brett asked him.

The kid glanced up and away as quickly as possible.

“Yes, sir,” he said, which was a far cry from how he’d been talking to Brett’s officers five minutes ago.

“What do you think these files are for?” Brett pressed.

“I dunno, some, uh. Murder?”

Brett stared the kid down.

The kid had the appropriate reaction. Brett leaned back in his chair.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Murdered. Each and every one of them is dead, dying, or working real hard to get there. So do you think me sitting here with you ‘cause you decided to raise a little hell to impress your buddies is a good use of my time?”

Silence.

He cleared his throat.

“No, sir.”

Damn, right.

“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” he said as controlled as he could, “So here are your options. You walk over there and apologize to my officers for being disruptive, we keep the skateboard, and you get to call your mama to come all the way down here from Queens. No harm, no foul. _Or_ you sit for a minute in the cell with Big Billy over there.”

Big Billy let loose another string of slurred expletives right on cue and tried to punch the cell door again.

The kid pulled at his collar and bowtie.

“I’ll say sorry, sir,” he mumbled.

Uh-huh. Good choice.

One down, twenty million to go.

He had a wave of them, mostly from up north because while prom happened over a period of three weeks or so, the guys up north usually claimed the first week as their own. All the venues up there were booked solid. Kids every type of under- and over-dressed flocked the streets at night. Stations all over called requesting back up to help contain the veritable blanket of youth and painful color choices from upsetting the nocturnal law and order.

And upset it they did.

Brett got a call over the radio, screeching for him to get his happy ass over to Claremont because Frank Castle had been spotted by a group of highschools from Horace Mann up that way. Prom made highschoolers feel invincible in general, but these highschoolers in particular decided that their wild and crazy night would only be improved by a little vigilante justice.

I.e. Frank Castle had found himself in a stand off with thirty juniors and seniors in the Bronx and he was trying, bless his soul, to be gentle about ruining their night, but he really had a fellow terrorist to catch.

Shots were fired.

Brett knew Castle well enough by that point to know that they were fired in the air.

But still. Shots fired. Brett had to go.

Castle wasn’t the only vigilante mobbed by teenage dedication, although he was the only one who told them all to scram or suffer the consequences. Luke Cage was a bit more chill about all the kids trying to take pictures with him on his doorstep. And that was fine until the kids realized that that was the Immortal Iron Fist who had just returned to his place, complaining, from McDonald’s. Sasha posted a picture on Instagram of him hugging his McDonald’s bag to his chest and glaring down at her and her friends from the top of a telephone pole.

Brett didn’t know how to spread the message to all these kids that, just because they were allowed out past curfew for once did not mean that vigilantes had to accommodate or appreciate this.

Bafflingly, most of the kids in the city seemed to have decided that their local night goblins had hearts of gold deep down in there. Either that or kids were just afraid of nothing and no one anymore. First Castle, then Rand, now Jones. Rand’s picture was in the news by the next morning and that set off a city-wide competition among the youth as to who could get the most prom pictures with vigilantes and superheroes in one night.

Poor Cap.

He was so blonde. And so easy to find over all them heads in Brooklyn. The guy made the papers too, although his title was “Local Hero Flocked by Highschool Enthusiasts on Subway.”

Someone made a facebook page called “Leave Steve Rogers Alone,” with the thoughtful subscript: “seriously, the guy’s just trying to live his goddamn life,” which got thousands of followers overnight. Cap liked the page and then, apparently at the behest of his publicist, posted a short message on his twitter account saying that he was flattered by the enthusiasm, but would kindly request a little more discretion.

Barnes replied to the message with “He ain’t shit anyways, kids. me and @SWilson are here for all your picture-taking needs. We’re gonna be in Bryant Park on Wed. 9-11. Come say hey. We’ll wear matching suits.”

Anyone with eyes could tell that this was the result of Cap’s publicist making a phone call, but prom-goers didn’t appear to care too much. They demanded to know what color suits Wilson and Barnes would be wearing.

You know, the real important stuff.

Sasha asked Brett to ask his mom if she could spend the night in Hell’s Kitchen to be closer to this action. Sasha’s dad long-sufferingly apologized for his daughter in a separate text and said that she and her friends were just really into this whole superhero formalwear thing.

Yeah, no shit.

“You should dress DD up in a suit,” Brett told Foggy as they watched the news over the counter at Josie’s. “He could be the next internet sensation.”

Foggy raised an eyebrow at the series of red, webbed suits and dresses a group of kids in Queens had assembled for their big day. They were beyond proud to show off to the reporter. Brett hoped Peter was somewhere losing his precious little shit.

“He’d want a red one,” Fogs said.

“Probably a bow tie, too,” Brett agreed.

“Oh, no. Definitely a bow tie.”

“We could get him a red one to match.”

“Nah, man. We should get him a cravat. Send him out like a 18th century French lord or something.”

Brett thought about that. The kids on tv all opened their dress shirts to reveal spandex Spidey suits underneath.

“Only if he wears the horns,” he decided.

Sasha informed Brett, as he taught Amos how to make Mickey Mouse pancakes, that she _knew_ he knew Spiderman and, as her favorite cousin, he had a moral obligation to introduce them.

Brett stared at her. Then flipped the pancake. Amos cheered.

“This is your chance to be the cool cousin,” Sasha negotiated.

“Girl, you already had your prom, he’s probably off at his,” he snapped. Then removed Amos from the counter to fetch pancake toppings from the fridge.

He only noticed the silence when he looked up.

Sasha stared at him like he was a target.

“ _His_ prom?” she repeated.

Aw, fuck.

“ _He_ has a prom? He goes to prom? He’s _my age?_ ”

Peter, buddy, I’m sorry. I am not to be trusted either.

He sighed. Amos tugged at his hand, having acquired maple syrup.

“Spiderman’s Sasha’s age?” he asked.

UGH. Children.

“I can neither confirm or deny—”

“OH MY GOD. I’m texting Naomi.”

Brett asked Foggy about it because he was honestly curious himself now and Foggy texted back an adorable picture of Peter trying to escape his aunt’s attempts to slick back his hair, taken apparently by his date.

“Volume is in,” Foggy wrote back.

Ah.

“Who’s he going with?” he asked.

“Our office assistant MJ. They’re best friends. She told him that they’re wearing yellow and that’s that. He’s been moping for weeks. She’s so proud of herself.”

Yellow was a pretty strong color, Brett didn’t blame him too much.

“IS THAT SPIDERMAN?”

He held the phone above his head so Sasha couldn’t see it. Amos thought this was the height of comedy and the two of them made enough racket that Brett’s mom came down to see what the fuss was about.

“I’m disowning you if you don’t introduce me to Spiderman,” Sasha threatened. Brett tried to appeal to his mother’s argument-ending sensibilities with his eyes.

“Let me see,” she said.

Brett held the groan back behind his teeth. He knew better. This would not end well. But still. His _mama._

He made sure that she understood the ramifications of what he was about to show her and announced that he would only do it if the kitchen door was closed. The kitchen door was closed. Amos and Sasha whined outside it.

His mom laughed and smiled as he opened up the picture again to show her.

“Aw,” she said, laying her hand on her heart, “He’s just a baby isn’t he? Where’s his date?”

Brett showed her the following picture Fogs had sent of Peter with his arm around the waist of a sweet-looking light-skinned girl in a yellow dress. She was taller than him, and she didn’t appear to be wearing heels.

His mom was so charmed. The apples of her cheeks stood out in her face as she delicately handed the phone back.

“They’re a handsome couple,” she said. “He’s going to grow up big, that one. You can see it in his shoulders.”

Yeah. Yeah, he was. Brett could see it, too.

“Don’t show Sasha, lord knows she’s got enough boys to crush on.”

Roger that.

“I hate you,” Sasha announced when he and his mom reopened the kitchen door.

“Does Spiderman have a girlfriend?” Amos asked. Sasha scoffed at him.

“Only losers to go prom alone,” she said.

“Spiderman is going to prom with his best friend,” Brett told Amos. Amos beamed up at him. Sasha grumbled.

“Is she hot?” she asked. “Can I see the best friend? What color are they wearing?”

Again, obviously the most important question.

“Yellow,” he said. That was harmless.

“Ugh, _yellow_? Who wears yellow to prom? He should have worn red.”

“Maybe he’s tired of red,” Amos offered helpfully.

“Well if he was tired of it, he should just change his suit.”

Brett tried to imagine Peter in a yellow suit. He just looked like a power ranger. He muffled his snort and determined that it was time to eat.

“Brett.”

“Sasha, it’s not gonna happen.”

“Okay, but consider this: if Spiderman ditches his date, then I can seduce him and he can be part of this family and then you can bully him to your heart’s desire.”

Ah. Yes, tempting. He’d always wanted a tiny, violent second cousin with zero regard for the law.

“Pass.”

“Ugh, you’re useless to me.”

Foggy posted six horrifying pictures on his facebook wall of them in highschool with the bright cheery text “LOOK WHAT I FOUND” plastered over top of them.

The primary option was to find those pictures and _burn them_ , but now that they’d been posted, there was no hope. The only other options were to murder Fogs or to come up with a scathing, brilliant comeback.

Which, naturally, he had at the tip of his tongue.

Coworkers had already started freaking out and oozing all over the pictures before he could submit the comment, but he was satisfied once the deed had been done.

“Damn, I forgot how much of a theatre kid you were,” he wrote.

“Fuck you,” Foggy wrote back.

“Did Matt go to prom?” Brett asked over tense, ceasefire drinks the next day. Foggy pouted at him.

“Matt says that prom is an ableist, patriarchal institution that he’ll have no part in propagating.”

Uh.

“Not 100% sold here.”

“Yeah, me neither. Broke him down. It’s not a nice story.”

“Oh?”

Foggy drew lines through the condensation on his drink.

“He was in on a suicide hold during his junior prom.”

Fuck.

“Yeah.”

Damn. Had Matt ever done anything wholesome in his life?

“Yeah, no. He said that he couldn’t do senior prom because he had a court date to get emancipated, but that didn’t pan out for him.”

Good god.

“Maybe we should have a prom,” Brett thought out loud.

Foggy paused in massaging his drink to stare at him. He beamed.

“Brett, you’re a genius sometimes,” he said.

“Noooooooooooo,” Brett had never heard someone so opposed to having fun in his life. Hell, half the station had been totally down without question, although a lot of that was borne of the desire to embarrass the ever-loving shit out of their children. Ellen had rushed off to get her old prom dress out of her mother’s attic for the sole purpose of seeing her twin girls cringe.

“Foggy, _why_? I am so happy being miserable,” Matt moaned into his desk, clutching the corners so he could not be removed from it.

Foggy huffed at him.

“We are going to take pictures. We are going to eat food. And we are going to go clubbing,” he said, “You like almost two-thirds of that agenda. You’re going to be _fine_.”

“But the misery? What will the misery do without me? Who will keep it safe?”

God.

Murdock must have been a theatre kid, too.

“Fuck you, I was an emo kid.”

Right, duly noted.

“How the hell can you be emo in Catholic School? Didn’t y’all have uniforms or something?” Brett asked.

He got a nasty expression in return.

“I don’t remember, I was highly medicated during the whole of it.”

Naturally.

“Dopamine is good for you,” Foggy barked. He dug his arms under Matt’s armpits and Matt clung harder to the desk and started kind of rumbling like a mad cat. “Up.”

Brett saw no less than four of his juvenile offenders on the way to the restaurant with Maynard’s arm in his. She’d gone out and purchased the most sparkly, low-backed dress she could find. It was navy blue and stunning. Her husband told her at the door that she looked like Audrey Hepburn.

It was probably the hairpiece that did it.

The kids didn’t want to make eye contact, but Brett had an example to set here, and so stared them down as he passed them. He wanted to be sure that they understood that it was, in fact, possible to wear fancy clothes and not make a fool of yourself all at the same time.

Karen looked like a model in peach waiting outside the restaurant with Jessica Jones’s sister, Trish Walker, who was apparently her date. Brett kind of got it. She couldn’t very well bring Castle, could she?

Two seconds in the presence of those two brought Brett to the intriguing conclusion that Trish Walker had a fat crush on Karen and she was doing a piss poor job of containing it. She couldn’t seem to decide where her hands were supposed to go in the gray suit she’d worn, nor could she remember not to stare open-mouthed at Karen’s profile.

C’mon, girl. At least, like, try to be cool about it.

Karen turned into an angry, flapping swan upon Foggy’s arrival. He’d wrangled Matt into a bowtie, and Matt looked like he’d rather be exploring a sewer. He held onto Foggy’s elbow less casually than usual, if only because he needed his hand to be free to help him exude pouting vibes from his entire body.

A handful of other attorneys and officers showed up to join what they had fondly called ‘The Ceasefire Event of the Year.’

It was pretty good. They had dinner. They had drinks. They traded horrible stories with attorneys, many of whom had equally horrible stories, and then they went out dancing and Brett got to witness Matt suffering in a restaurant, a bar, _and_ a club.

It was a good night.

It was interrupted, of course, by a gang trying to shoot up a load of known officers and attorneys in the middle of the city. So that was fun.

Or panic. It was panic, too.

Mostly because a load of officers and attorneys weren’t _stupid_ and Ellen had had her old prom dress tailored to include a pocket for her pistol. Ellen was always one step ahead of everyone, that way.

Matt finally, _finally_ perked up once people started screaming. And Brett blinked and he was gone. Leaving Foggy in Karen’s loving protection. Fogs didn’t seem concerned.

And in the end there was no reason to be because at some point in the shouting, Matt bumbled his way right through the whole gang’s party and smashed like, three drinks in the process, which allowed him to apologize as loudly as he could. Turns out dumping a drink down someone’s ass is an excellent distraction from the task in front of them.

Ellen took the opportunity to draw her weapon and was followed by whoever else had one.

The standoff intensified.

Until Matt made his merry way back from the bar and ‘mistakenly’ wrapped his arm around someone who was very much not Foggy’s waist. He started flirting. The guy was stunned stupid. Matt asked him why everyone was standing all quiet and it really threw off the other side’s momentum when the guy in front of him turned back a little to explain that they were kind of trying to kill all these officers.

“Oh,” Matt said, “I see. I see. Well, okay. What happens if you kill them?”

A pause.

“They die?” One of the guys over there answered.

“Ah, right. And then what?”

Another pause.

“They—we—uh. Bury them?”

“Bury them?” Matt asked. “Aren’t they a load of cops—hold on, sorry—Are you guys a load of cops?”

What.

“Yeah, we’re half cops,” Foggy said for everyone. Maynard and Ellen gave Brett a firm look which translated to ‘silence your frenemy.’ He could only shrug helplessly at them. Neither Fogs nor Matt could be stopped when they got going.

“Oh, I see,” Matt said. “Right, so. Has any one over there already called for backup?”

Some civilian patron pressed up against the far wall coughed.

“Well, yeah,” Maynard said.

“Right, right,” Matt hummed. He turned to the guy next to him and elbowed him in the ribs, “Like, practically speaking, I don’t think you got time to bury these guys, man. I’m thinking a hit and run’s gonna be more up your alley right now.”

The people around him took a moment to stare at him.

“Either that or you could not shoot?” Matt tried. “Like, legally speaking, this is probably your best option. I mean, knick one of them bastards and you’re looking at a felony for aggravated assault and I’m pretty sure this place has a surveillance camera. But I’d need to confirm that, here, let me confirm—hey Fogs?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a surveillance thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Oh, Imma say about thirty or so, not counting all of us.”

Matt sucked in a breath through his teeth and leaned onto his new friend’s shoulder to tell him out of the corner of his mouth, “So that’s not great.”

He patted at the guy’s shoulder cheerfully. “But it’s totally up to you, man. You do your thing, hey, but before you do that, you think you could give me a hand back over there? My boo’s the one with the blond hair. Purple—no blue—is it blue? I dunno—Fogs what color tie are you wearing?”

The guy didn’t know what the fuck had happened, and to be fair, Brett wasn’t quite sure he had either, but, to his credit, the man did stiffly walk Matt back across the line into Foggy’s safe hands. Matt called him an upstanding gentlemen. And? He seemed? To blush?

Sirens sounded outside.

Matt’s evening had been improved by 2000%. He was all smiles from that moment out. At the dive bar they’d all given up and migrated to, he sat primly and happily in Foggy’s lap and beamed at his whiskey like the cat that got the cream.

Foggy even got a few public kisses, which was just about scandalous for Matt Murdock.

Public displays of affection? Open lap-sitting?

Damn. Boy was one drink away from the best night of his life.

“I’m calling it a successful prom,” Foggy declared the next day, having lured Brett outside on his break with a cup of coffee.

Yeah, surprisingly, it had been pretty good.

Notwithstanding the Mexican stand off. But even that seemed like it had somehow improved the evening. Very James Bond-y.

“We should post all the pictures side by side the old ones. It’ll be like a glow-up thing.”

What the hell words were leaving Foggy’s mouth now?

“Glow up, Brett. Are you serious?”

Yes. That sounded like something involving worms.

“No, you dinosaur. It’s like when us ugly ducklings turn into beautiful swans. You put the pictures side by side so folks can appreciate your transformation.”

Ah. Okay.

“Okay?”

Yeah.

“Perfect. I’m doing it now.”

Wait. Wait, no. That hadn’t been permission.

“Ah, no takes-backsies. Anyways, my breaks over, I’ll see you around, man.”

“Fogs, don’t you dare post more highschool pictures.”

“What? Sorry, can’t hear you. Break. Over. Gotta run. Bye, Brett, I love you!”

“FOGS.”


	12. take me to merch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It started with a t-shirt.

It started with a t-shirt.

It showed up on Amazon and Brett laughed for far too long before ignoring it and buying a new HDMI cable. His mom was insistent that the Nelsons would have one of these at the store, but Brett had once watched Fogs explain to his dad in four different ways what the difference between hardware and software was.

If Edward Nelson had purchased an HDMI cable for the store over the last month or so, it could only be by mistake.

He left the computer at that.

Sasha came to pound on his door wearing said shirt and demanding that he introduce her to fucking Spiderman already. She’d brought friends this time, god. He was a cop, for crying out loud, these kids were supposed to be afraid of him. He went downstairs and snapped the door open between her knocks so fast that she screamed and leapt back. Then called him a jerk.

“Brett, you _have to_ ,” she informed him. The kids around her went awkward and refused to make eye contact. “We got his shirt. We’re basically friends now.”

Right, because that’s how that worked.

“No,” he told her. And slammed the door.

“BRETT,” she shrieked on the other side, “I’M TELLING NANA BESS.”

Fine. Tell her. See if he cared.

Goldberg walked into the station to drop off some paperwork and the whole place went quiet and still. Maynard’s mouth fell open and her grip on her thermos went dangerously slack. Ellen’s face over her current clipboard went drawn and tight. The Captain stopped talking to Brewer and started to turn purple.

Goldberg finally realized that no one was fucking talking, including Brandy at reception across from him and looked around.

“What’d I do?” he asked, because by then it was basically a guarantee that he’d done something, it was just a matter of what.

“What the _fuck_ is that?” Maynard barked, jabbing a finger at his chest. At the abdomen of the spider stretching its legs up and down the guy’s front.

“Ah,” Brewer sighed, “My roommate got it for me as a joke and then broke our damn washer last night, so I had to take all my shit to the laundrymat. This is all I got that ain’t a uniform right now.”

Yeah.

A joke.

Real funny.

The Captain made a strangled noise behind his teeth and stormed off to slam his office door closed behind him. Besides the fact that that kind of shit was just going to encourage local vigilantes, the Captain and Peter had developed a…complex relationship. Brett might even go as far as to say that the Captain was jealous that Peter liked Brett and Maynard and flat out refused to work with, talk to, or accept bribes from anyone else. Including you-know-who.

It didn’t help that Peter had started to occasionally go out of his way to find Brett or Maynard these days to alert them of something going afoul in the city which he either didn’t want to deal with or didn’t have time to deal with. Naturally, he demanded payment for these tips. Which was how Brett discovered that tips could be purchased for lollipops. The Dum-Dum brand specifically. He tried tootsie roll pops once and had been met with disgust and betrayal, and more importantly, a drop-off in the number of tips being brought to his attention over the next two weeks. So, Dum-Dums it was; he had a whole bag of them in his car now because this was his fucking life.

Although, that being said, they did come in handy for scared kids and for, oddly enough, getting Jessica Jones to cough up a few tidbits of info of her own.

He made a note in the notebook to investigate favorite foods and sweets among the night folk for the purposes of softening future interactions. Then the notebook was confiscated by the Captain for the time being so that all the information in it might be recorded in non-shitty handwriting. Brett wondered if he’d ever be getting it back at this rate.

Goldberg bared his teeth awkwardly and informed the room that he was just gonna go now.

It was the best thing for everyone.

It was fine—well, it was whatever—until a load of shit went down with Matt and then out of the blue, suddenly _he_ had a shirt.

It read, in giant white block letters on a red background “I AM NOT DAREDEVIL.”

Matt had three printed for himself, one in red (of course), one in black with the words encased in a neat red rectangle, and an inverse of the red one, so that he could wear it unobtrusively under his white collared court shirts and bust it out, Superman-style, for any lingering paparazzi trying to get in his face on the way back to his office.

Matt was basically a model, what with his far too pretty face, far too toned abs and ass, and ridiculous hipster glasses. And his antics all essentially amounted to free advertising for Able’s Printmaking around the corner.

People in Hell’s Kitchen fucking _loved_ that shirt. Brett looked up one day and instead of all those damn “Supreme” logos, he was looking at the word “Daredevil” plastered across everyone’s chest. Including the kid sitting in front of him with a smashed nose and a missing tooth, trying to explain that he and his buddies weren’t trespassing, sir, they were just trying to practice their parkour.

Brett stared at the kid. Then stared at his shirt. Then back at the kid.

He eventually got it.

He was let off because they truly couldn’t find anything on him or any of his other buddies besides a load of dumbass. And dumbass was, thankfully, not a malicious or illegal substance at this stage of the game, otherwise, they’d have run out of holding cells at the station.

Brett drew the line at Wade’s shit, because that stuff was far, _far_ to cute to represent all of Wade’s Wade-ness.

Some folks, however, thought the logo was adorable and made a Spidey version of it. Some other folks would swap one of the half-moon sides of Wade’s logo for half of a Spidey version and went along on their way, talking about how they just loved those two, weren’t they cute together?

No.

No, they weren’t.

Wade was the _worst_ influence. He’d taught Peter how to open bottles with his teeth. His _teeth_ for fuck’s sake. That wasn’t even bad vigilante shit, that was just bad life shit. Kid had a chipped right canine now, but he was oh-so proud of himself. He did his new trick for Brett and smiled at him beatifically before handing Brett a beer he was way too young to have purchased.

Now where could he have gotten that from, huh?

Three guesses.

“May trusts them, man, what can I say?” Foggy sighed.

“You can say that underage drinking is a crime,” Brett pointed out reasonably. Fogs gave him a look flatter than Kansas.

“Dude.”

“Shut up, I don’t wanna hear it,” he countered.

“Dude, we drank _so_ much.”

“That was before I got a badge,” Brett qualified.

“Yeah, and after you crammed a stick up your ass.”

Well, Fogs was in a mood. Probably had to do with the fact that his latest hobby including dragging his boyfriend out of fights with reporters.

“It’ll pass,” Brett tried to assure him. Foggy groaned and dropped his forehead onto the tile of his kitchen counter.

“Will it, though?” he lamented.

“It’ll pass.”

It didn’t.

Brett could not fucking believe that he’d gotten his ass woken up in the middle of the goddamn night by his childhood neighbor to come break up a fight in the middle of the goddamn street.

When he got there, still in his pajamas since the journey of two blocks hardly warranted a dramatic costume change, he was met with, not Daredevil, but Battlin’ Jack’s fucking kid laying the fuck into a guy who was becoming increasingly hellbent on killing him.

It was hard to decide who to arrest. Especially because both of them were drunk as hell and screaming expletives at each other.

Brett couldn’t quite make out the whole situation because he was busy half-laying on Matt, trying to calm him down enough so that he would remember that he was not wearing one of his ninja get-ups and so needed to play poor, defenseless blind man, but what he rapidly became aware of, while waiting for backup to get the other guy under control, was that for once Matt hadn’t started it. His neighbor tried to explain over Matt’s uncoordinated jerking and squirming, that she’d heard someone shouting really loudly outside her window and had peeked out to see Matt tapping his way home, swaying a bit.

She’d called Brett when the other guy had grabbed ahold of the back of his shirt and started calling him names. Matt had, in his fairly intoxicated stupor, gotten a good hit into the guy’s jaw and tried to meander away from there, but the other guy was bigger and drunk and persistent and had gotten ahold of him again. That’s when the fight had really started.

Teesha was terrified for her neighbor. So was most of the crowd which had gathered by the time Willows and Brewer got there to lay on the other guy.

Brett tried to reason with Matt who had moved rapidly through being drunk and aggressive as fuck to being drunk and sad and sick-looking. Brett knew, he just knew if he put him in the car he’d puke all over everything.

Willows asked him what was the hold up and he sighed and grabbed Matt’s shoulder. He startled and jerked as though to lash out again.

“Hey. It’s me, it’s Brett,” Brett said. Matt cocked his head a bit and made a confused sound. Senses must have been all jumbled up from the head-smashing and liquor. “Easy, man. You’re drunk as hell. Some guy beat up on you. We gotta go to the station.”

Matt blinked at him. Glasses gone. Brett looked around but couldn’t find them, or the cane for that matter.

“Man, be cool,” he said, hoping that Matt understood. He guided him to the car and put a gentle hand on his head to keep him from smashing it against the roof.

Matt was really feeling them extra shots and was way off his game. The other guy in the altercation took his moment of weakness to call him a series of names unfit for polite or hell, public company. Matt lifted his head out of the trashcan to wipe his mouth and shout a few back at the guy.

Brett sighed.

Willows shook his head and carried on with the paperwork.

Matt grumbled something into the can, but Brett couldn’t make it out over the wretching. He figured that maybe once he finally got some of that liquor out, he’d be sober enough to make words happen in sentence.

In the meantime, he called Foggy.

The tragic irony of it all was that the screaming dickface informing the room of Matt’s alleged sexuality was wearing one of those Daredevil shirts. He obviously had missed their whole backstory. Or maybe he hadn’t? Maybe he’d seen Matt and gone up to him to talk about the shirt, but Matt had been at that fun point of intoxication where he didn’t want to talk to anyone, he just wanted to find and cuddle Fogs or Karen or honestly? Whoever and whatever the hell you put in his hands.

Matt was kind of a cute drunk, Brett could admit that much. Although it took a hell of a lot to get him there. Brett hoped that this other guy hadn’t been within reach at the time of meeting. That would make things complicated, even if it would certainly explain a lot.

Willows sarcastically asked the guy in the cell if he was wearing the Daredevil shirt for the irony and then the tables fucking turned like Brett’s stomach.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the guy slurred, “I _am_ Daredevil. And this—this—this fucking _poser_ ’s all over here tryin’ to, tryin’ to get in on my good fuckin’ name.”

What.

Seriously. _What?_

Matt made a curious sound and took a break in trying to pop his thumb out of its joint to escape the handcuffs Brett had had to put on him to keep him trapped to his desk. He didn’t want to put him in the cell as he was, without his cane and disoriented, but he also could not be trusted not to wander off on his own in that very same state.

“You’re Daredevil,” Willows repeated incredulously. “Is that a fact, man, or are you talking out your ass?”

“Fuckin’ yeah, I’m Daredevil” the belligerent shithead snarled, “What, you think some puny-ass motherfucker like _him_ ’s got shit on me? C’mere motherfucker, we’ll go. Let’s go. Can take your ass lying down.”

Brett thought that pointing out that taking a blind guy in a fight wasn’t exactly a show of physical prowess was not a move to be appreciated at the present time. Matt, though, bless his heart, took that one hard.

“The fuck you saying?” he slurred in that guy’s direction. “Y’ain’t need eyes to catch your ugly mug, pal. ‘S a pretty wide fuckin’ target.”

“C’mERE YOU LITTLE—”

Jesus _Christ._ This was all so unnecessary.

“I’m DAREDEVIL, YOU HEAR ME?” the guy roared, “ME. NOT YOU.”

“ALRIGHT, FUCKIN’ HAVE ‘IM, ASSHOLE. SEE IF I CARE,” Matt roared back.

There was a pause.

The guy in the cell frowned, evidently confused at having been given his way so easily. Matt scoffed at him and folded his arms across the edge of the desk. He dropped his head into them and scoffed again. Brett could have sworn he heard him mumbling something but decided not to engage. They had bigger problems on their hands.

Matt was asleep by the time Fogs got to the station to pick him up. And Brett and Willows were shaking their heads because by then the Captain had been there for fifteen minutes, too. He couldn’t exactly not be. They had a moron claiming that he was Daredevil in their custody and _now_ they were going to have to investigate him at 3 o’clock in the damn morning.

This was madness.

Daredevil was right behind them, snoozing and drooling adorably on his arm while slowly slipping off the corner of Brett’s goddamn desk. Investigating this other guy could not be a greater waste of time or resources. The Captain knew this. The Captain was still beyond convinced that Snoozy over there was the real Daredevil, but he’d already bungled his chance to sort that out and so now he was faced with this shit. 

Matt fell off the desk and wrung his hand right before Foggy got there.

The Captain sighed like he was staring into a bottomless well of hopelessness.

“Sir, we need you to really think about what you’re saying,” he tried to reason with their new angry friend. “This is a very serious allegation—”

“He—him— _that guy_ over there. He thinks—he thinks he’s Daredevil, you know that?” Friend Andrews informed them. Brett had found Friend Andrews’s wallet which had bestowed upon them his good name and thirteen bucks in ones.

The Captain looked over his shoulder at Matt who Fogs had managed to wake up and was presently trying to talk some sense into. It wasn’t working. Matt had finally been reunited with the optimal hugging target. The only thing holding him back was the handcuff, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.

He did not look very Daredevil-like.

“Sir, that was a story run by the press,” the Captain said carefully. “Mr. Murdock has denied these allegations; he does not claim to be—”

“ME. I’M DAREDEVIL. ME,” Friend Andrews informed them at max volume. “And Imma put ‘im—that guy, Imma put him down, lemme tell you that.”

God, way to find the exact wrong thing to say.

“Mr. Andrews, are you suggesting that you wish to cause Mr. Murdock bodily harm?” the Captain groaned, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion.

“Yeah, I fuckin’ am,” Andrews said.

“Is that why you jumped him?” The Captain asked.

“No, no, you ain’t listenin’. I jumped ‘im ‘cause _I’m_ Daredevil.”

Yep. Totally.

“Mr. Andrews, here’s what I need you to do, son,” the Captain negotiated, “For everyone’s benefit right now, I need you to drink that water over there and sit down for a minute, alright? You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“No, I do,” Andrews insisted. He yanked his shirt forward so that he, as well as the three officers in front of him, could read it. “Here. Says I’m Daredevil. Right here.”

Ah.

No. Nice try, though. There's a big “Not” you’re missing there, buddy.

“Alright, we’re gonna go ahead and call this one drunk and disorderly for now,” the Captain decided. “Mr. Murdock, are you--?”

No. Whatever the Captain thought he might have been, he wasn’t. Fogs had done his best, though, and gotten him more or less back into the chair.

“Witness says it was self-defense,” Brett told the Captain from his left side. Matt nuzzled into Foggy’s neck and made soft happy noises. Fogs tried to convince him that this would be easier if he unfolded the leg he’d twisted under himself.

No dice. Could not possibly compromise prolonged contact for comfort. 

“He’s too drunk to be making decisions on his own right now,” Brett added. “Not to mention blind, sir. He didn’t know what was coming.”

The Captain sighed even harder.

“Just take him home, Mr. Nelson,” he said.

Brett prayed to every god that he could find a shrine to that that would be a one-off case. Clothes do not always make the man, he wanted to scream from the mountaintops. Wearing a Daredevil shirt or a Spidey beltbuckle or a Hawkeye undies does not make you that person. It just. Does. Not.

Brett understood inspiration. He understood admiration. He understood wearing a hat or a shirt to as some kind of statement or group solidarity thing.

But people, he could not stress enough, were so fucking stupid. They struggled to distinguish between what it meant to look like a superperson and to actually be that superperson.

Case in point.

Someone had posted a video of Cap ripping a log in half with his bare hands on Instagram and now Brett was reading an article in _The Times_ informing the city at large on behalf of Metro Gen that this was not an activity normal people should be attempting to perform for a myriad of reasons. Unsurprisingly, the folks trying this new challenge all strapped on their Captain America gear before turning on the camera.

Before this, there had been a brief trend of idiots trying to strangle each other with their thighs like the Black Widow. Brett didn’t know if it was a meme or a sex thing, but it had gotten to the point where he had a whole pile of battery claims sitting on his desk.

Exhausting.

The whole thing was exhausting.

And it only got worse.

Friday night saw three guys in the holding cells, fighting over who had the best Spidey shirt and pretending to shoot web at each other.

Saturday night saw a murder by a freak literally obsessed with Deadpool. He was taken into custody and argued that he had allegedly had a breakdown over his schizophrenia which had cause this whole chain of events.

He didn’t even have schizophrenia. That was what people thought Wilson had. And because Brett’s life was horrible, he actually had to go knock on Wade Wilson’s apartment door and ask him if he had an associate and maybe also schizophrenia?

Wilson, sans mask and draped with cat, blinked at him and then slammed the door.

“What the fuck is wrong with the world?” Brett heard him ask the cat through the open window.

It took some serious pleading and promising to convince him that A. He did not have to pack up and move house now that the police knew where he lived and B. that all he had to do was say no to both allegations.

He said no. He demanded to know where Brett got his address. At gunpoint.

He then lamented the fact that he had gotten insurance for his new scooter before getting a damn ticket for parking it illegally. He didn’t even have it anymore, he told Brett. Shit got totaled and he really didn’t want it anyways.

Brett left with his life at least, although he wasn’t convinced he left with the whole of his sanity.

Brett cupped his face in his hands and counted to ten so that he could deal with the gang of three sitting handcuffed on the curb in front of him.

They didn’t say anything, but they had the grace to look at each other a little sheepishly.

“Have you guys even _seen_ Spiderman?” Brett finally breathed. The Spiderman in front of him lit up.

“Yeah, I look in the mirror every day,” he proclaimed.

Brett needed another ten count.

“Then you know,” he said slowly, “That Spiderman is approximately the size of an ant?”

Silence.

“Dude, are you calling me sho—”

“I’m saying you’re not Spiderman,” Brett snarled before the idiot could finish his sentence. “You are _not_ Spiderman. You know how I know? Because I know Spiderman. He is this big, you see? This. Big. You, my friend. Are this big. Do you see this? This is at least a foot, here. Furthermore, I cannot catch Spiderman. I have tried to catch Spiderman. Spiderman has fucking _hugged me_ and I cannot catch Spiderman. It took me two minutes to catch you. Do you understand? Do you see this, man? This is how I know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are not Spiderman.”

Silence. The guy’s lip stuck out defiantly under the edge of the mask he’d pulled up to his nose.

“I got the suit,” he said firmly. “And you don’t know who's under the suit so—”

Brett yanked the mask off the rest of the way and leaned into the guy’s face. He swallowed anxiously. Brett raised an eyebrow at him.

“Looks like I do now,” he said.

He then rounded on the Daredevil and Deadpool squirming next to their buddy.

“You guys want to play ball or no?” he asked.

Funny how now they did.

Wade and Matt would be disgraced. 

Peter showed up a few days later on the hunt for a Dum-Dum and willing to part with some information for it, but Brett needed him for something entirely different this time.

He placed his hands on the kid’s shoulders. Peter gazed up at him through the mask; it kept his face blank, but Brett knew him well enough by that point to recognize confusion on it.

“Peter,” he said, “I need you to do me a huge favor. I will give you the whole bag of Dum-Dums. And some gummy bears.”

Peter made a twitter account.

A fuckload of other vigilante twitter accounts cropped up in his wake. Everyone’s usernames were just jumbles of letters, but they all had one thing in common and that was a crazy impossible selfie or video.

Peter posted a short, oddly artistic video which started out focused on the night city skyline. It was cut in half by the shadows of a rooftop, wet and lit by streetlights. Peter then lowered the camera to see his opposite hand. He flicked his suit-covered fingers and something sprayed out a line of web from his wrist. He raised the camera so it could see where the line had stuck, even though it looked like it just flown out over the city and disappeared.

And then he started running. Barreling towards the edge of the roof. His shadow showed him loping while holding his phone in his left hand.

He jumped.

The camera held remarkably steady as it tracked his descent, showing his little red feet flexing out over the blur of city lights. The lights blurred more and then went from going down, down, down, to moving up and up and up until Peter reached the crest of his arc. Then in a flash, the camera spun around so that it showed Peter’s mask.

He made one of the suit eyes wink and then threw out another line of web at the last possible second.

It was pretty damn terrifying to old people like Brett who fucking hated rollercoasters. It was also pretty damn terrifying to half the station team who now knew intimately that Peter played games of fate with freefall every night he went out.

But.

Peter ended the video with a freeze frame and a bar at the bottom which read, “Stop trying this at home, please. People are getting hurt.”

And somehow, the whole video felt a whole lot gentler.

People on twitter went wild. They tried to figure out if it was green-screened or faked, but then Peter’s random assortment of letters started answering people back.

“No, I made it last Wed.” he wrote.

“I make the web myself. There is not a safe alternative on the market. You can try, but man, let me tell you, it’s gonna be a long fall.”

“Falling without knowing how to land can actually break your knees, and if you’re really not careful, can permanently paralyze you, friends. Please stop doing this. Even superpeople make fun of the ‘superhero’ landing.”

“It’s cool if you want to run around in a Spiderman onesie, just know that if you go around claiming to be me, you’ve got like 100+ counts of assault which people could hold against you. And trust me on this one, they WILL press charges ;0”

It was a beautiful, beautiful thing, Twitter was, when it was used as a force of good.

Or, uh. Something like that.

Wade posted a picture of himself chilling with his cat in his living room, surrounded by ammunition and bags of what was 100% cocaine. He captioned it, “Can y’all stop using me as an excuse to mutilate pets??? Deadpool is a friend of all animals and not your fucking excuse to be a sociopath. #killpeoplenotpets”

Wade got thousands upon thousands of followers within mere hours.

Jessica Jones said that the next person who ran around pretending to be her was now responsible for her taxes. She reminded everyone that they were small business taxes and ergo Satan’s worst nightmare. Trish Walker retweeted the post with the cute little note “<3 love you girl, I told you we could just hire a guy.”

“I got a calculator and a bottle of Jack. I don’t need no man,” Jess wrote back.

Jessica Jones got several thousand followers as well.

And they kept cropping up. More and more of them. Other superfolks on twitter started retweeting their pithy little slogans. Barnes retweeted Peter and wrote “woah, talk about calling the cavalry. We got the night crew on twitter now, too?”

Peter replied with an image of Barnes smoking on his couch typing out the text on his phone.

“YOU LITTLE SHIT, IMMA FIND YOUR ASS SPIDEY,” Barnes replied.

And from there, it appeared that legitimacy was established. And more importantly, the city had been warned.

If people were going to scour the internet for the latest superhero merch, then it was only fair that their heroes showed them how fucking insane they actually were. Would it prevent those who were really determined to be shitheads? No. But it would discourage a lot of potential shitheads before they even got started, or at least Brett hoped it would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please join me in rolling around in this nonsense


	13. sinkholes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castle took them to a tunnel which led straight to hell.

Brett’s usual problems paled in comparison to the case sitting on his desk in front of him. He didn’t love murder cases and he especially didn’t love the ones involving kids.

Naturally there was a lot of weirdness circulating around this particular family of once-living people. A number of neighbors reported loud disputes and one or two had even called the police to file noise complaints. One time, someone had called about suspected domestic violence, but when the officers had arrived to the scene, nothing seemed out of order.

Brett wanted to know what they were hiding. Brewer had his money on a family fortune left in a Nana’s will. Maynard had been watching too much Netflix again and was obsessed with the occult. Ellen saw her occult and raised her simply a cult.

Brett wasn’t so sure it was any of that. He didn’t want to jump to any one conclusion before he had more shit sitting on his desk.

What he did know, however, was that the Decland family had both money and financial problems. They had two kids, one boy, aged 14, one girl, aged 10 and they had a family dog. A white little monster which looked like one of those dogs on the fancy dog food cans and which had escaped the massacre of his owners by hiding in one of the kid’s rooms.

The boy had just started at Midtown Science and Tech, and Brett just happened to have some connections there.

“You guys can’t be showing up in front of my school,” Peter lectured him and Maynard. Brett wondered if his aunt ever just looked at the kid’s backpack and sighed. The thing was falling to bits, although lovingly stitched back together with highschool Home Ec skills.

“Nothing Spiderman related,” Maynard soothed.

Peter puffed up in even greater irritation.

If there was no Spiderman, he wasn’t interested. Brett pulled the picture of his schoolmate out of his binder and offered it to the kid.

“You know him?” he asked. Peter glared at him and then snatched the picture to look at it closer. His face gave nothing away.

“He dead?” he finally asked.

Brett could neither confirm or deny at this stage in the investigation. Peter rolled his eyes.

“He’s dead,” he said, handing the picture back. “I don’t recognize him. We don’t really mix with the freshmen.”

Made sense. Alright, onto step two.

**BM:** Fogs you heard of any folks called Decland?

 **FN:** the ones in the news? That’s a fucking tragedy man

 **BM:** yeah those ones

 **BM:** you or DD heard much of them?

 **FN:** what

 **FN:** oh

 **FN:** this is detective Mahoney talking

 **BM:** who else would it be??

 **FN:** I dunno, santa? anyways I just experienced something incredible and now have an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G idea which your nephew will die for

 **BM:** foggy

 **FN:** first you gotta get one of them stuffed pikachus and then we’ll get it a hat and one of them little heart recorder things they have at Build A Bear.

 **BM:** foggy

 **FN:** Wade can do a fucking spot on pikachu impression, man. Like. For real. He fucked with Matt for like an hour last night. So we’ll get him to say a bunch of weird shit and then you and pikachu can be detective besties and Amos will DIE I promise you

 **BM:** Foggy focus. Dead people. Ask DD for me?

 **FN:** YOU ARE NO FUN ANYMORE

 **BM:** ffs okay I will consider the pikachu

 **FN:** THINK OF IT BRETT Y’ALL COULD PLAY POKEMON GO WITH THE PIKACHU

 **FN:** youre thinking about it aren’t you?

 **FN:** pretty good right?

 **FN:** right???

 **BM:** foggy I will pay you any amount of money to shut the fuck up about pikachu right now

 **FN:** fuck

 **BM:** what

 **FN:** sorry gotta go the fucking FUN POLICE are here

“I thought you guys were close,” Maynard remarked, watching Brett slam his forehead against his steering wheel.

He sat up and re-dug his phone out of his pocket.

**FN:** its fucking low to text my mom brett

 **BM:** four people have died franklin

 **FN:** Matt’s busy pretending he’s not sleeping at his desk. KP says papa decland tried to hire her the other day.

 **BM:** thank you

 **FN:** text my mom back and tell her I’m being fucking cooperative

 **BM:** will do. Thank you. will also consider the pikachu

 **FN:** if we do the pikachu I will absolve all your sins for this month

Like a damn dog with a bone, this guy was.

Karen Page was none too pleased for Brett and Company to be all up in her business. They entered the office and Karen immediately started shoving shit out of view. He tried to tell her that they weren’t interested in any of her other cases, but she’d already yanked a black table-cloth with festive purple sparkles dancing through it out of a drawer and thrown it over her whole desk.

It had the effect of making it appear as though a business casual séance was about to take place in there.

“Karen,” he said slowly.

“I don’t know shit,” she said.

“This is about the Declands,” he sighed.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we talk, you know, without the veil?”

There was a long pause as Karen considered it.

“No.”

What exactly had he expected?

Karen owned up to the fact that Levi Decland had in fact come by the week previous trying to acquire her services. He thought that someone was stalking himself and his family. Karen didn’t like the look of him or the story he was telling and demanded proof.

She gave the offices a few photocopied emails Decland claimed to have received from the family’s stalker. She also sent Brett a few of the audio files the guy had recorded when this alleged stalker had called up to their apartment.

Brett didn’t really blame her for turning him away. The audio files sounded pretty weird. Fairly obscure.

“Sounds like he was fucking interrogating his delivery guy,” Karen said offhandedly.

Yeah, it kind of did.

“So you refused the case?” he asked her. “Did he leave or was he persistent about it?”

Karen sniffed and swept her hair over her shoulder.

“He was a real dick about it,” she said, “Tried to fucking yell at _me_ like this was my problem. I told him to get out of my office if he couldn’t control himself and he didn’t want to go so I had Matt escort him.”

Matt’s version of escorting involved dragging a body through their waiting room and throwing it out into the hall. He was a one-man security team for the office and no one questioned it. The whole thing was apparently great entertainment to all those chilling in the waiting room. Hell’s Kitchen inhabitants thrived on drama.

“You know where he went after that?” Maynard asked. Karen shrugged.

“I think Matt gave him a couple of cards,” she said. What she _meant_ was that Matt threw the guy out and then chucked a handful of fliers after him as a gesture of goodwill before slamming the door.

They then went to poke at Matt who had already been caught sleeping at his desk once that day and, from the looks of it, hadn’t learned his lesson. Foggy came in and crouched down low next to his desk, then clapped his hands together next to his ear as hard as he could. The poor sap fell right out of his chair.

“You’re such a dick,” he slurred, self-consciously wiping at his mouth. A couple of kids in the waiting area giggled before re-hiding behind the bookshelf.

“Detective Asshole wants to know where you referred Italian Cologne last week,” Foggy said.

Matt seemed to know exactly who he was talking about. As in the cologne guy, not Detective Asshole. Although he probably knew who that referred to, too.

“Gave him the usual cards,” Matt said.

The usual cards consisted of two PIs, a guy who operated the floor below them and who thought Private Investigating mandated an office straight out of the fifties, and Jessica Jones’s card, the design of which had changed since Brett had last seen one. It was purple now. Someone must have owed her a favor.

“That guy? Nah, he was fakin’,” Jessica said with her usual flat affect from her doorway. She refused to let them into the room, so they had to chat in the hallway of her complex.

“How do you know?” Brett asked.

“You seen his shit? Staged as hell. Pretty sure he wrote those emails. Fucking tore the Amazon driver a new one for no damn reason. Guy was paranoid. Course, that’s what happens when you start planning a murder,” Jessica said.

Now those were some very brazen accusations, Miss Jones.

“Hey, you don’t wanna believe me, that’s your prerogative,” Jessica said.

“You got any other type of proof?” Maynard asked.

Jones thought about it. Then seemed to decide what the hell.

“Guy put me on edge. Didn’t like him. Kind of wanted to figure out who he had it out for, so started asking around. Rumor had it he tried to hire a hitman.”

Oh, now that was new. Go on.

“Yeah, so I asked the usual players in that field, if you know what I mean. They ain’t heard anything, so I talked to Deadpool to see if the guy had crossed through any of his wires. You know how many people just go straight to Deadpool, man? It’s crazy. He’s expensive as hell. Fuckin’ amateurs, I’m telling you.”

That was horrifying. Please continue.

“Deadpool said he had heard of this guy, but obviously, he’s out of this guy’s price range. Said the guy kept making a big fuss over the fact that he wanted Wilson for ‘protection’—you know, wink wink, nudge nudge.”

Highly suspicious.

“Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Wilson normally doesn’t give a shit about people’s motivations, but beyond there not being enough cash to be worth the effort, he said the job involved kids and he doesn’t fuck with anything involving kids if he can help it.”

Wade’s morality was so chaotic, it was like trying to follow the damn stock market sometimes.

“You know who he went to next—Decland, that is?” Brett asked. Jones pursed her lips and then stretched them into a sardonic grin.

“Yeah, but you ain’t gonna like it,” she smirked.

Frank Castle was doing his best impression of a turtle and laying low and camouflaged somewhere in the depths of the city. Finding him when he didn’t want to be found was like trying to find a hay-colored needle in a pile of alfalfa.

“Why the fuck would Decland try to hire Castle? Who does that?” Maynard demanded in the passenger’s seat. “Castle and Wilson—that’s top brass, big money. Decland couldn’t have had that kind of cash.”

Brett agreed, although he was now wondering if Decland’s civil servant position had given him some insight into the way politicians played ball in this city. He might have seen something he shouldn’t have in his boss’s office.

“You think he hired the hit?” Maynard asked.

On his own family? Seemed strange as hell.

“Yeah, that’s how I feel, too.”

Maynard didn’t know as much about vigilante identities as Brett did and so, with her at his side, he needed to be more careful of who he talked to and how. He couldn’t very well just walk back over to Nelson, Murdock & Page and ask Karen to give Castle a ring. And he couldn’t go to ask Matt to go chase the guy out of hiding either.

It made things complicated.

He had to go through Foggy, who was less sold on Castle than his compadres. Foggy rarely held a grudge, but when he did, boy, you better believe he was dying with it.

Frank Castle had yet to clear his name in Foggy’s black books.

Brett decided to circumvent all that by going to hunt down Deadpool first. This was always a fucking challenge, given that the best way to Wade was via Peter and Peter wasn’t too interested in being helpful at the moment; Brett may have burned his chance back there at the school.

He didn’t have many options here though, and so had to try again anyways. Who knew? Maybe Pete and his occasional teenage goldfish memory had forgotten his ire by then.

Peter didn’t answer any texts and so Brett and Maynard had to go hunting for Spiderman, a task which required a keen eye, some good timing, and a bribe.

Peter had grown tired of the lollipops around the beginning of the month. Teenagers were exhausting. Keeping up with their interests was a full-time job of its own. Brett really felt for brand advertisers these days. On the upside, Pete was fairly reliably hungry for something at all times. It was mostly just a matter of figuring out what.

It was getting warm lately so Brett thought that a gift card to Baskin Robbins would probably go over well. Maynard thought otherwise and insisted that they get the kid a card to a bubble tea place instead. Bubble tea was popular among the youth, she claimed.

Brett yielded to her knowledge.

They eventually found Pete, but not at any of his usual perches. No, instead, they found him at war with Hawkeye the Younger behind the McDonald’s on Madison.

They were a fucking mess, the two of them. Brett could not understand this antagonism. As far as he was concerned, they were the exact same person in slightly different circumstances and with slightly different team colors.

Hawkeye the Younger and Spidey did not see it that way, of course. The two of them were engaged in full-voice argument, drawing the occasional attention from college students wandering past, when Brett and Maynard arrived on the scene.

Hawkeye the Younger was making a particularly sharp point about Peter’s encyclopedic knowledge of vintage sci-fi films being a useless sinkhole of time which might be more productively spent in honing fighting skills. Peter’s retort to this involved some strong language focused around Kate’s abysmal lack of people-skills and alleged self-centered heroism.

“Well, sorry I’d rather save people than make them feel special,” Kate spat.

“People deserve to feel special,” Peter hurled back at her.

“No, _you_ just want to feel special.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Dear god, these two were not old enough to be having this conversation. They should have been fighting over sneakers or something.

Brett cleared his throat and got the full-force of irritation from both of them.

“Wade’s busy,” Peter insisted.

“Yeah, being a fucking murderer,” Kate added. Peter rounded on her with fury visible even through his mask.

“You don’t know what you’re even talking about ,” he said.

“No, you’re just blind to reality.”

“Wade doesn’t murder people all the time, _Katherine_.”

“No, you’re right. He’s got a good 30-70 split between Murder and Terrorism.”

Okay, did he need to like, separate them or?

“He’s not a terrorist, don’t talk shit about what you don’t know.”

“Prove to me he’s not a terrorist, go on, I’d like to see you try.”

Maynard gave Brett a strong look of confliction. Yeah, he wasn’t quite sure what to do here either.

“Prove to me that Hawkeye’s not a public menace and I’ll prove your dumbass terrorism shit.”

“Clint doesn’t hurt people.”

“He’s literally a professional spy.”

“Yeah, but the _worst_ spy. And anyways, he doesn’t do that anymore.”

“What, so you’re training to be an even worse spy than him then?”

Hawkeye the younger went quiet and still. Peter stood his ground against the wall next to the fire-escape. Kate sneered at him.

“No, go on,” she said, “Keep on talking shit. I dare you.”

“I ain’t scared of you, Katey-Kate.”

“You sure? ‘Cause I’m noticing a lack of shit-talking, right now.”

Alright, that was enough. These two were going in circles.

“Peter, Kate. Four people have been murdered. I need to talk to either Wilson or Castle. Castle as the end goal here. How do I talk to Castle?” Brett interrupted in a firm voice. He finally had both kids’ attention. Peter glanced at Kate and then jutted his chin out.

“I’ll find him for you,” he said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kate snapped, “ _I’ll_ do it. This guy couldn’t track a guy leaving a trail of blood.”

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Alright, well. It was a step forward.

Peter and Kate could not be outdone, either of them, and so both took the job. But they had very different methods of tracking. Peter’s way of tracking involved a lot of people skills. He had contacts and perches throughout the city which he used to pull information and then observe. Then pull more info and observe.

It was a little like his webslinging, his pace.

Kate, on the other hand, was just fucking ruthless. She crashed through the city, banging into poor humans, threatening them where it hurt, whether it hurt somewhere soft or hard, and then rattled forward to the next mark like an angry pinball.

It made Brett fear for what Hawkeye must have been like in his prime.

Frequently (and hilariously for Brett and Maynard) the two collided on marks and the mark was forced to try to answer questions from two radically different approaches, with Spidey appealing to their better nature and Kate flat out dangling the consequences of not giving up info in front of their faces. In those moments, Brett and Maynard found themselves stepping in and calming the poor person, ensuring them that these two were working with the police in this moment and that no harm would actually come to their families or genitals. This worked to smooth the interaction over and put the person at ease to provide the clue for the next mark. And then off the kids went, leaving Brett and Maynard to soothe the informant and send them off home safely.

This worked until they started to get into darker territory, where the police were not welcome. Where Peter and Kate were among their people.

It was crazy how personalities changed according to context. Peter’s whole demeanor switched over from Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman to up and coming protégé of Deadpool and Daredevil, your worst fucking nightmares. Kate went from slightly grumpy Teen Hawkeye to huntress.

Their marks got older and sharper and much less forthcoming with info. Peter slammed one guy into a brick wall and told him in a dead even voice, “Talk.” Kate stared at a man with an arrow twirling between her fingers. Her dark eyes even darker under the shadow of her brow.

They were dangerous fucking kids under all that charm and teen drama. The reminder was profoundly uncomfortable.

Peter and Kate found Castle in double, maybe triple the amount of time it would have taken their mentors to locate him, but by god, they managed it and both were so proud of themselves. They hit the foot of the building he’d built his latest safehouse in and turned back to Brett and Maynard with twin grins and puffed out chests.

L’il baby vigilantes, tracking down serial killers all on their own.

Well.

Mostly on their own. They refused to acknowledge that the other had helped them in any way whatsoever.

Brett and Maynard pounded on Castle’s door and he was strongly displeased to see them. But perhaps, and surprisingly, even more displeased to see the damn kids.

“Scram,” he told them.

They did not.

Castle snarled at them.

Snarling, however, was a mode of affection, these two had learned from their elders. Then Peter noticed Castle’s dog and that made Kate notice Castle’s dog and somehow all was forgiven and forgotten between them in an instant.

“Please, Please, please,” they begged Castle with huge eyes. He looked to God for guidance and support.

“Please, please, _please_ , Mr. Castle? We’ll leave right after. We promise. He just—he needs to know he’s a good boy.”

Castle tried to shoo them away again but made the mistake of moving about a foot too far out of the doorway. The kids wriggled past him and set upon the dog like they were, all three, touch-starved. Castle blinked at the lack of children before him and then spun around with clawed hands. His dog gave him a dumbass pit-bull grin in the center of the little room behind the door and wiggled his body from side to side as the kids lavished attention on him.

Brett glanced at Castle and saw that he’d given up his clawed fingers to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

“You are the worst fucking dog, Max,” he murmured to himself. “The worst fucking dog.”

Castle reluctantly allowed Brett and Maynard into his safehouse, provided they gave him their phones (inspected for bugs and recording devices and then dropped into a cardboard box by the foot of the door) and provided that they did not touch or ask questions about any of his shit. It was highly suspicious shit, besides the cot and other furniture that is. Castle’s computer was far too tricked out for it to be any kind of normal PC. He had stacks of notebooks with sticky notes in them. A box of meticulously organized manila folders with some office supplies inside it.

Frank Castle, if he chose not to be a mass murdering psychopath and endured court-sanctioned, mandatory trauma therapy, would probably have been the best office manager in the state of New York. No wonder he and Karen were so into each other. He probably loved to seduce her by organizing her unruly evidence collection. She probably returned the favor with his hit list notebooks.

Brett couldn’t decide if this was kinky or just plain weird. Either way, it became clear, watching Castle scold the dog while he stretched out into Peter’s lap to ensure maximum coverage in Kate’s belly-rubbing efforts, that for all his menacing, Castle had a soft spot for the kids.

He didn’t try to scare them out again and didn’t impose any rules on them like he had on Brett and Maynard.

Brett tried to break the ice by complimenting the state of the dog. Castle turned to him, supremely unimpressed, and said, “Sometimes I think he’s too stupid to live, but then he just keeps on doing it anyways.”

Right. Okay. Maybe let’s just focus on business.

“I’ve got a case involving multiple homicides right now. Involves a family called Decland,” he started.

“Decland? Oh, that fucker. Nah, not any of my marks,” Castle said.

“So you had nothing to do with them?” Maynard clarified. The dog gave someone behind them a kiss and this was followed by a sound of disgust.

“Ehn, wouldn’t say that,” Castle said, “Guy started asking half the damn underground where the fuck I was. Wilson showed up, warned me he was full of shit, but the fucker just would not shut his damn trap and I’ve got to keep a low profile at the minute. Damn near shot him myself, but Wilson was of the opinion that that was not overly wise, if you know what I’m saying.”

Huh. So Wade had been suspicious of Decland’s story like Jones then.

“Yeah, first thing Wilson comes here saying is the guy’s money’s fuckin’ weird; he don’t trust it. Also mentioned there were kids involved. I ain’t do kids.”

No one did kids, it would seem. That was a relief.

 _Their_ kids in the corner had both stretched out to imitate Max. He’d gotten excited about that and had scrambled up to sniff at their ears and walk all over them. The giggling was a little distracting and felt out of place given the state of the place.

“When you say the job involved kids, do you mean that Decland was asking for someone to kill his kids?” Maynard pressed.

Castle gave her an eyebrow.

“Well, I mean, as far as he _said_ , the job was a terror gig.”

“Which Decland was asking for protection against?” Brett asked.

Castle’s eyebrow climbed a bit.

“Yeah. Protection,” he said flatly.

Yeah.

No. Not protection.

“Fuck,” Maynard swore softly so as not to corrupt the youth. Castle glanced from her to the kids and dog.

“They heard worse than that, detective,” he said. “Why’re y’all up in arms about this shit?”

Well.

“Two minors, shot dead at the scene. Boy, 14, girl, 10,” Brett said.

Castle’s stony face stayed smooth as a rock.

“Well, I guess you’d like the bastard who did it, then?” he said.

Brett hope to god that it wasn’t him.

“That’s right.”

Castle nodded and then sighed.

“I can’t give you that for sure,” he said, “But I imagine I might be able to get you a start. Max,” he snapped. The dog looked right at him and started wagging his tail-less butt. “Hold the fort, I’m going huntin.’”

See the thing about having Castle on your side was that it was, above anything and everything else, confusing. Comforting, because he was far less inclined to maim, shoot, or murder anyone on his side of things, but terrifying because his mere presence just set your teeth on edge. He said he could find Decland that night, which didn’t make sense because they already knew where Decland was. His cold and cooling corpse was in the morgue.

Castle scoffed at this and locked the door to his safehouse. He turned around to face Brett and Maynard, thankfully without the Punisher shirt and gear. He’d just grabbed a backpack and some street clothes.

Brett realized abruptly that he wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at the other two. Now sated with puppy-time, they weren’t snipping at each other, too busy sharing pictures and selfies taken with Maxwell the Stupid.

“Y’all are done, go home,” Castle told them. Peter and Kate paused in their tittering to stare at him owlishly over their phones.

“I don’t wanna,” Peter said. Kate bobbed her head in agreement.

“Don’t care. Get.”

Peter dropped his gaze, but Kate elbowed him in the ribs and stuck up her chin. Peter watched her do that, looked at Castle, and then half-heartedly followed suit.

Castle stared him down in full acknowledgement that he was the weakest link in this vigilante trio. He dropped his eyes again and nudged Kate again.

“Maybe we should go,” he whispered.

“No,” Kate snapped. “It’s our job now, too. We can’t just leave it after all that work. Gotta see it through, Clint said so. For better or worse.”

Barton, your next job is to teach this kid to pick her fucking battles.

Brett glanced over at Castle and saw exactly what he thought of Barton on his face.

“This is your last chance,” he said. Peter got a little frightened and pulled at Kate’s elbow gently. She ripped it away.

“We’re coming,” she declared and Peter panicked, having not realized that they were now a team unit.

“We’re not coming,” he said over her, pulling harder. Kate whirled around and took his head with her and for a brief moment, the adults got to witness back of the debate and following scolding. When Kate turned them back around, she said “Coming,” and Peter looked miserable.

“I’m sorry” he mouthed to Castle.

Castle sighed and shook his head.

“Alright, whatever. But keep out of the way.”

Where the fuck was Brett’s notebook? The tolerance for the young’uns in this community was off the fucking charts.

Castle took them to a tunnel which led straight to hell. At the mouth of it, he forced Brett and Maynard to strip off their uniforms and hop into street clothes. He then leveled an expectant look at the little ones who scrambled off to do the same. Brett didn’t know where they found street clothes, but they came back looking exactly as youthful as they were. Castle slapped a palm over his face in exasperation and Brett and Maynard got to witness a quick-and-dirty vigilante lesson about making yourself not look fucking twelve.

Peter’s blue sweatshirt was rolled up to the mid-arm and his collar tucked in so that it laid flat and didn’t show over the top of the sweater’s. Castle took off his own watch and strapped it on the kid. Kate’s hair was then let all the way down and Castle produced a well-worn army jacket from his backpack which became Kate’s overcoat. Its sleeves were adjusted like Peter’s. Castle fucked up Peter’s hair and then stood back to give the two a once-over.

It wasn’t much, but they did now look more along the lines of 18 and 19 than 16 and 17.

Castle threw his hand at it and declared it good enough for now.

“You stick close,” he said firmly to both of them.

Brett got the feeling that the whole duckling thing was something they were both used to because they nodded enthusiastically, now all excited to be under the guidance of The Punisher himself. Castle just told Brett and Maynard to stop looking like narks.

Then into hell they descended.

Hell was a whole part of the city that seemed to appear at night and vanish in the morning. Kind of like a night market. It was dark, somehow wet, and paved with trash-filled streets full of people walking around with barely concealed weapons under their clothes. People from all sorts of backgrounds. Some seemed to dress alike, others stood out like sore thumbs in neon colors or fantastic outfits, looking for all intents and purposes like they were going to a rave. Folks walked by with tatts with more than personal meanings stamped all over their bodies.

Castle wove through these people casually, with the kids at his heel. Brett and Maynard had to swallow down the cop instincts to keep up.

Castle seemed to have a very specific place in mind for getting things moving. He headed north up the street. They passed a line of different bars and pubs, raucous with the night crowd. Even more rowdy than your typical NYC place, it would seem. But that might have just been Brett’s imagination.

Castle finally slowed his relentless pace and took a slight left in through the heavy door of a place with a plaque on the side declaring it once a school for girls.

Every single human being in this bar could have and should have been arrested. Every one of them. Brett recognized some of them from Wanted posters. To his surprise, Wade Wilson was at the bar. And even more to his surprise, Castle looked his way like he was the one he’d been searching for.

Wade was arguing with the guy behind the counter and his employee. He wasn’t wearing his mask and seemed perfectly at ease in the place despite that.

Peter recognized him immediately. Faster than Brett did.

Castle flinched and turned to stop the inevitable, but Peter had already lurched past him and latched onto Wade from the side. Everyone in the conversation over there panicked and then Wade whipped around and gave Castle the most furious look Brett had ever seen in his life. It promised death. Painful beyond imagination. Wade wrapped a protective arm around Peter and stood up from the bar without a word. The guys behind it bared their teeth at each other.

Wade approached Castle with Peter tucked securely under his arm.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?” he hissed. “Bringing fucking narks, bringing—” he noticed Kate. She beamed and waved. Wade looked back at Castle.

“They wouldn’t fuck off, man, lay off. You’re the one teachin’ him to get attached,” Castle growled right back, unafraid of Deadpool’s wrath. Peter peeked up at Wade, confused at his face and also what appeared to be the increasing pressure Wade was inflicting on his shoulder.

Guy was pissed.

“Say that shit to my face, Francis, go on, do it,” he said, just barely audible over the din of patrons around them. Castle lifted his chin.

“The fuck did Decland go?” he demanded.

“The fuck you doing hanging ‘round the kids?” Wade shot back. He turned his gaze onto Kate. “Come here, honey,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

Peter pulled at him.

“Wade, _no_. We gotta see it through,” he insisted. Kate nodded hard and somehow, Wade understood what they were on about.

“Y’all can see shit through when you ain’t get carded anymore,” he said. “Outside. All of you.”

The guy at the bar gave Wade a questioning jerk of his chin on the way out, and he gave a responding jerk of his head, promising that he’d handle it.

Peter and Kate were vocal about their displeasure with Wade’s rules when they were outside at the back of the bar. They had veered soundly into whining territory and both wrapped themselves around Wade’s middle. They squeezed while he talked to Castle and Brett and Maynard like none of that was happening.

“Decland?” he said, “The one with the bad money?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah, he ain’t dead. I literally—I caught his ass here the other night lookin’ like a dick. Like _you two_ ,” he shot down at the kids. They insisted that they only looked like dicks because Castle made them. Wade ignored this.

“That’s what I thought,” Castle said. “His kids are dead.”

“What the fuck?”

“I know.”

“What kind of bastard would buy a hit on his own fuckin’ kids, man?”

“’pparently his kind. You know where he went? These guys are trying to bring him in.”

Wade frowned and then stood up straight like he’d just realized something.

“Dunno where he went, but guarantee you I can draw ‘im out,” he said. He gave Brett and Maynard a suspicious squint.

“Provided _some_ people ain’t go ‘round talking about shit they ain’t seen.”

“If he’s out there, it doesn’t matter how he turns himself in, it just matters that he does,” Brett said. “Preferably in one piece.”

Wade evaluated him for his honesty and then made prolonged eye contact with Castle.

“Why the fuck would you kill your fuckin’ kids, man?” he said, and then started walking. The kids cheered as this apparently translated to begrudging acceptance of their presence.

In some ways, walking around the underground as a cop was stupendously delightful. You could actually see how exchanges for illicit goods and services took place. You recognized faces of folks known for trafficking rings, gang wars, armed robberies. Brett’s heart fluttered in his chest with each cluster of people they passed by in the alleys and streets they walked through.

It wasn’t a happy flutter, but more like a fascinated one. The kind you felt as a tourist, watching someone do an indigenous performance or a craft; just wanting to know more.

The other feeling he was having right then was a strong, tooth-souring, throat-clogging anxiety. Maynard kept clutching at his wrist. He didn’t blame her. Some guy walking against the current of bodies shoulder-checked Castle on purpose and Castle stopped in the middle of the street and stared after him. The man didn’t even look behind him before gunning it. People on both sides of the street watched this and folks starting giving Castle a wider berth. Castle returned to walking as though none of it had happened.

Wade, on the other hand, leading the troop, kept alternating between scolding the kids and getting distracted by people trying to talk to him on the pavements. Everyone knew Wade Wilson. Everyone seemed to want to either fuck Wade Wilson or get him to do a job with or for them.

A couple folks even looked down at Peter and one asked Wade if he was his kid in a syrupy sweet way which Brett could see was a threat. Wade told him to try his luck and see what happens.

“Plenty of people in the world who can’t count to twenty, sugar tits,” he told the guy. He dragged Peter with him, even closer after that. Brett was half-surprised he didn’t just scoop him up and toss him over his shoulder like a toddler. He himself wished he could do that with both him and Kate.

Kate appeared to have stricter boundaries on her mobility than Peter. Brett got the impression that she wasn’t allowed to go underground, period. Barton must have acknowledged and ruined every one of her earlier attempts to get through that archway, given how stoked she was to be there. Castle kept throwing out a hand and pulling her away from shit, telling her not to stare, for fuck’s sake.

They were, according to Wade, really close to his contact, when they were stopped by someone crashing into Kate and attempting to kidnap her.

Good start. Brett almost shot the guy right there until he realized that that particular black hoodie and ripped pants ensemble belonged to none other than their favorite clinically depressed Archer, himself.

“What the fuck?” Barton snarled with Kate smashed against his chest. He used both hands to muffle her protests. “What the fuck? What the fuck?"

Then he saw Brett. He mugged at Wade hard.

“What. The. FUCK.”

“Blame this guy,” Wade said, waving at hand at Castle. Castle shrugged.

“They gotta learn somehow, man,” he said.

“Are you fucking—Katherine, you need to shut up right the fuck now, I am _not_ playing. Do you understand?” It was the most serious and articulate Brett had ever heard Barton speak. Kate went still and quiet immediately in his grip. She dropped her eyes. Barton didn’t acknowledge any of this, he was too busy trying to smash Castle’s head open with just his eyes. “She is seventeen goddamn years old, Frank. They don’t gotta learn shit until they can be guaranteed not to fucking die from it.”

“Tell me about it,” Wade encouraged. Peter seemed to have realized the full extent of the trouble he and Kate were in by then; he had wrapped a few fingers around Wade’s un-suited wrist in apology. Wade didn’t look at him like Barton refused to look at Kate.

That shit was fascinating, if Brett was honest with himself. He wondered if that was some kind of way of teaching. If this was how vigilantes and people in the underground dealt with young people. Do not let them out of your sight. Or grip. Do not acknowledge them, do not let them speak. Do not let them stare.

It was a way of moving through the world with maximum efficiency and active blindness. A way of learning to look at only what was directly relevant to you.

“Up,” Barton hissed. “Now.”

“Can’t,” Wade said. “You heard of that quad-homicide up town?”

Barton frowned and finally looked back at Brett and Maynard.

“Oh for the love of—who are you going to—“

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Everyone in their corner of the street jumped. Everyone including the vigilantes, Brett noted, which was validating. Brett didn’t recognize this woman in her leather jacket for an embarrassing full minute of her snarling at Barton. Then it hit him like a load of bricks.

The Black Widow.

She was _pissed_. Then she looked at Peter and went through a full cycle of emotions, Brett was sure, even though not one of them crossed her terrifyingly smooth, terrifyingly flawless face.

“Tony is going to _murder us_ ,” she hissed at Barton. “With fire. Get them out of here.”

“I’m trying, Nat. But Wilson’s got—”

“I don’t give a shit what Wilson’s got. We’ve got loyalties to maintain—”

“And I am working on fucking doing that—”

“Out. Now.”

“Nat, you need to chill out, alright?”

Nat was not freaking out in any capacity which was measurable by human means, as far as Brett could tell. But Barton proved himself to have a third eye or sixth sense or some shit because she brought her eyebrows down and set her jaw at him.

“I’m working on it,” Barton repeated. He turned back to Wade. “Where’s your man?”

“Gal. If I know her, about a block or so down.”

“How long is this gonna take?”

“Depends on how many drinks I need to buy her, you headed up?”

“Wasn’t, but am now. Here, I’ll take him. C’mere, Pete.”

“Y’all are making a fuss over shit that there ain’t no damn reason to fuss over. It’s drawing attention,” Castle interrupted. “The kids are _fine_. Anyone touches ‘em, I’ll handle it. More important right now is to finish the objective. Kids’ll be up top in no time and y’all can scream at ‘em to your heart’s content then.”

There was a pregnant pause while these many violent parties all communicated with their eyes. Maybe that was why Matt stayed above ground more than the others. It was an accessibility thing.

“Fine,” Barton finally said. Kate did not cheer; she didn’t lift her eyes from the ground either. “But Castle, so help me god. If even one person touches her—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Go undermine Denmark’s election or whatever the hell it is you two are doing.”

Ah, yes. Right. How could Brett forget that, for all his casual nonchalance, Barton was literally a trained counterintelligence operative.

“Wilson,” The Black Widow said without inflection.

“I’ll take him home after,” he said.

The Widow then addressed Peter.

“Next year,” she promised, “We can practice coming here. Once you’re eighteen, you can do whatever suits you. Is this fair?”

He nodded silently. The Window ruffled his hair. Then stood up and held a hand out to Barton.

“Come. We have a princess to ruin,” she said.

“Kate, be bad, don’t look at anyone, don’t take anything anyone gives you,” Barton stipulated.

“You two are disgustingly attractive,” Wade noted, waving them both off with his hands. The Widow gave him a flirty smile and then whipped around with Barton on her heels. He followed dutifully, but kept glancing back furtively towards Kate.

The gal Wade led them to was his buddy and frequent teammate Domino. Peter saw her and lit right up again like he had when spotting Wade in the bar. She noticed him, then beamed and held her arms out for a hug.

“Look who’s finally made it downstairs,” she said warmly, rocking herself and Peter back and forth.

“He’s in trouble, don’t encourage him,” Wade grumbled. “Need a favor.”

“Why trouble?” Domino asked. She was very hard not to look at. Just an absolutely stunning woman. Big liquid amber eyes and a gorgeous smile and a bit of Vitiligo around one of her eyes. She was all wrapped up in black leather and radiating heat and welcome. Brett’s mom’s voice in his ear hissed that she was not the type of girl he should even dream about bringing home.

“Mr. Castle brought us because we bothered him,” Peter told her. “Do you know a guy named Decland?”

Domino smiled at him and then smiled at Wade, patient for more information. While Wade explained, Maynard whacked Brett’s arm and gave him a meaningful grimace. He set his jaw and averted his eyes.

It was so hard, though.

Domino agreed to draw Decland out and told Wade that he owed her precisely one thing. She then looked at Castle for a long time. Castle, for his part, got a little awkward and started looking around to see if she was really staring directly at him.

“He’s yours,” Wade said flippantly. She wriggled in delight. Frank grimaced. She smiled harder.

“You’re so pretty,” she told him.

Castle appeared to regret everything that led him to that moment.

“I’m--” he started.

“ _Yours_ ,” Wade said over him. “Four hours. Dinner and a show this Friday; romance her, Francis. She likes gin.”

“I love gin,” she agreed.

Brett never thought he’d be jealous of Frank fucking Castle, but there they were, he guessed.

Wade chased more than led them all back up to the surface. He promised that Decland would be delivered that following morning at the station. He warned Brett and Maynard to never show their faces around the underground ever again, so help him God.

Then he grabbed Peter and whistled so hard and so loud that Brett thought his eardrums had popped for a second. Within moments they were all joined by the Devil.

He dropped down specifically to start beating the shit out of Castle and once Wade removed him from that situation, he moved on to checking Peter all over for anything untoward. Every couple of seconds, he snarled at Castle.

Peter allowed this.

“He’s fine, Red. Ease off,” Castle groaned.

“He’s a child, Frank. I expected more from you.” Damn, look at Matt out here, shaming the fucking Punisher. Matt’s head twitched and as quickly as he’d grabbed Peter, he snatched Kate over to inspect as well. She giggled while he did this, evidently less used to the procedure than Peter was.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Clint’s gonna tear me a new one later, but I’m okay.”

Matt huffed, satisfied with this.

“You two are lucky,” he said, “One wrong turn down there and you’d have run into the Hellhounds.”

Both Kate and Peter shut the fuck up and stared at him. Castle smacked his forehead into his palm.

“Hellhounds?” Peter asked. “A gang?”

“No, kiddo. Think Max, but bigger.”

“Max is nice,” Peter pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s because Max is attended daily by someone who could have morals if he so fucking desired.”

So the kids were good and traumatized now, operating under the impression that they’d just missed a man down there who sold huge, mutated dogs trained specifically to take down anyone who wasn’t their owner. Matt showed them a hideous scar in his side, which was most likely from some other traumatic mutilation of his body, but which did indeed look like a mean, healed-over bite.

Neither Wade nor Castle did anything to hinder Matt’s ghost-story-telling. They left the kids to panic quietly at first in the beginning and then loudly by the end.

They couldn’t decide if they needed to go back and save these poor puppies from their horrible vendor or to stay clear of the place just in case they weren’t so lucky to miss the stall the next time.

Once the horror was good and stuck inside their sweet little noggins, Matt took Kate and Wade took Peter and homeward bound they went. Castle then told Brett and Maynard that they fucking owed him one, because now he was going to have to go entertain this lady who looked like she wanted to eat him alive.

But, he said. They probably had their man.

“Guy hated his wife,” he explained before they split off. It seemed like a trip through the underground without getting themselves caught or murdered was enough for him to feel more comfortable giving them the full story. “Asked me to do her in so he could get with his mistress. I asked him what he was gonna do with the kids and he said he’d pay me double to take care of them, too.”

Jesus.

“Yeah, Wilson could probably tell you more about where he got the funds. We’re talking ten to fifteen grand here.”

_Jesus._

“Now, since I told him to get gone, I dunno who killed those kids and who you’ve got in the freezer at the morgue. But, if you need a hand leaning on him, go ahead and gimme a call. Can’t promise you he’ll be back in mint condition, but he’ll still be able to talk.”

No, thanks man. You’ve done plenty.

Decland turned up the very next morning, as promised. The station went into uproar. People all over asking why he’d just walked into the place. All he could say was that a higher power told him to.

Brett wondered if it was Domino or Wade.

That it might have been Domino was so painfully hot that he had to have Maynard slap him around the corner of the hallway where no one could see.

“You got problems, Mahoney,” she told him sadly.

Ah, didn’t he know it. 


	14. many roads to rome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Once it’s in place, you set the lock and voila,” the demonstrator said, waving at the bulky yellow strap in his hand, “It counters the enhancement. Then you can arrest your target as you would any other suspect.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part one of 2!!

Brett knew a little about the prison system; what he hadn’t heard much about was what the prison system did with enhanced people and this lovely presentation from the county office had not only been enlightening, but terrifying.

The presenter smiled in the station’s conference room as he ran through new procedures and best practice for handling enhanced people. For most stations, it was probably just a routine training course, but for their station and for several of the other larger hubs, it felt oddly pointed.

Brett felt more than a little singled out. Maynard too, he was sure, since she worked with him more these days on cases involving vigilantes.

He was a bit queasy.

The guy showed them all a new device which had been tested in the Ice Box, he explained. It was a type of collar thing. It had a digital lock on it and, as the guy demonstrated, it went around the neck of the enhanced person.

“Once it’s in place, you set the lock and voila,” the demonstrator said, waving at the bulky yellow strap in his hand, “It counters the enhancement. Then you can arrest your target as you would any other suspect.”

The strap looked to Brett to be nearly three inches in width. He sucked in a breath at the mental image of that thing strapped in tight around Peter’s pale throat.

No.

Take it away.

“Since vigilante activity is so rife in this sector and a couple neighboring ones, we’ve decided to give you guys, Station 40, and the team at Metro Gen the first official set of collars,” the presenter said, laying his hands on the sides of the box he had on the table next to his laptop. “You guys can use them as needed and we’ll make sure all is well before we roll them out to the other, smaller stations.”

Brett didn’t want to make eye contact with this guy.

“Any questions?”

The Captain tapped his lip with his middle and fore fingers, he’d been doing it through the whole presentation. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other and a slight jut to his bottom lip. He looked over his shoulder at the detectives and officers. Expectant. He wanted someone to ask a damn question.

Brewer took one for the team beside Brett. He raised his hand tentatively and when the demonstrator smiled at him in acknowledgement, said, “Are there really that many enhanced people running around that this is a problem?”

Brett flicked his eyes at the Captain and the Captain held his gaze for a long second or two before turning his gaze back to the presenter.

“Well, I don’t want to say that we expect this to become a normal part of your routine,” the presenter said, still with a damn smile. “But the number of enhanced people, or at least, identifiable enhanced people, has increased over the last decade. Now, obviously, there will be people who may not even be aware of their enhancements, so you might consider this a precautionary measure for anyone who appears to be showing signs of mutant behavior. Any other questions?” the presenter asked.

Maynard slid forward in her seat and put her hand up.

“Are these things painful? Do they cause pain?” she asked.

“Oh, no. They’re not painful in and of themselves, all they do is temporarily block the presentation of mutated bodily functions,” the presenter said. “Essentially, it’s like an off switch. So, let’s say you’ve got Spiderman and you get one of these guys on him, the collar isn’t going to hurt him. It’ll just make the laws of gravity reapply to him.”

Ellen’s hand shot up.

“What if,” she said, “We have someone like the Winter Soldier or Captain America? Would putting this thing on them like, reverse their enhancement?”

Oh.

Now that was a good question.

“Well, I doubt you guys would be arresting Captain America.” Sir, Brett thought, your confidence tells me that you have never in your life _met_ Captain America. “But it wouldn’t reverse the enhancement, as in, undo his size or anything like that, but it would slow down his metabolism and it definitely would reduce his strength to that of a normal human’s.”

“But they’ve been tested?” Brett finally clarified. “And they for sure don’t hurt people?”

The guy smiled at him with confidence in the set of his chin.

“100% safe,” he promised.

Jessica Jones got into a bar fight that week and Brewer went to get her. He followed the new procedure and when Brett came into the Station, Jones was screaming nonstop in the interview room.

His hands went cold around his cup of late-night coffee.

“What’s happening in there?” he asked the nearest officer.

“We don’t know,” The gal told him. “She’s only been here for ten.”

Jones screamed like someone was punching her in the fucking throat over and over.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, dropping the coffee on his desk and moving towards the interview room door with several other officers on his heels.

He slammed open the door and saw that no one else was in there with her. It was just Jones at the usual table, handcuffed in place and practically convulsing.

It was horrific.

Brett knew the second he saw a stripe of yellow peeking out between the loose black hair on her shoulders what the problem was. He crossed the room without remembering doing it and tried to get fingers between the collar and Jones’s neck, but that just made her flinch harder and struggle even more with the handcuffs. They bit into the skin around her wrists and hands hard enough that the skin went red and raw almost immediately.

Fuck.

“Jessica,” he said as calmly as he could, “I’m trying to help you, let me help you. I’m gonna take it off, but I need you to breathe, alright?”

Jessica, to his complete shock, attempted to take several gasping breaths at the order, but Brett realized she couldn’t seem to make her body do what it was supposed to. She could only wheezing noises low in her lungs.

“Make—stop,” she pleaded between them. “Make it stop. Can’t—can’t—”

“BREWER,” Brett roared, “CODE. _NOW.”_

Brewer was back in the room in an instant, rattling off a code which Brett’s fingers struggled to remember as he swept Jones’s hair off the collar and flicked open the box on the back of it. He inputted the code and the keys lit up green and then the collar’s latch unclicked and it fell loose around Jessica’s bony shoulders.

She coughed and gasped like someone had just stopped strangling her, and then she slowly laid herself out on the interview table and just breathed shakily. The tips of her fingers were nearly white. She shivered hard.

Didn’t say a damn word.

Brett touched her shoulder.

Still didn’t say a damn word. Didn’t shove him off. Just laid there with glazed over eyes, breathing.

Jessica Jones refused to be touched by anyone, for anything. Her acceptance of the pressure Brett put on her shoulder was proof enough that something was horribly wrong. He looked at Brewer.

“Get a fucking doctor, _now_.”

Jessica fell asleep in the chair before the medical team got into the room. They stood over her and whispered frantically and then before anyone knew it, there was an ambulance being called and Jones was gently being shaken awake.

She woke up suddenly and went a little berserk.

Brett watched an entire medical team hold this tiny woman down as she screamed and then watched as a group of paramedics squirmed in to give her a shot of something that made her calm down enough to be transferred into the ambulance.

And then Jessica Jones was gone and all that was left of the whole interaction was the blood smeared across the table and its handcuffs and the yellow collar.

They got word later that morning that Jones was in medical distress from some kind of brutal incident; her body was wrecked and in the process of healing itself, so when the collar had turned off her mutation, she’d been slammed with the full brunt of a set of broken ribs and blunt force trauma to her back. When the mutation stabilized again, she signed herself out of the hospital and got the fuck out of dodge.

She refused to open her apartment door to the police, even for an apology—formal or informal.

She screamed through the door that she heard nothing they said unless it came in the form of a warrant or through her attorney. If they didn’t fucking leave her alone, she shouted, she would sue for police brutality and harassment.

Brett didn’t blame her. Not one bit.

Turning that mutation off must have felt like being right back in the car crash that had nearly taken her life as a teenager. You don’t come back easy from that. Most people don’t come back at all.

The Captain had everyone put the collars back in their box and to leave them there while he wrote up a memo outlining their concerns with their implementation. But it was too late. The word was out.

Brett couldn’t find a single person he’d spoken to before. Not Jones, not Spidey, not even Matt. No one was talking. Everyone was petrified. Maynard sighed after they returned from yet another unsuccessful hunt for some information from Peter.

“Can you blame them?” she asked as she fell heavily into her desk chair. “I mean, if one of my friends got fuckin’ super-tazed by the police, then yeah, I wouldn’t be so hot on talking either.”

Brett reported the lack of information to the Captain and watched him place his hands on his hips in thought. He closed his eyes and appeared to bite some metaphysical bullet.

“Mahoney, come into my office.”

Ah, _shit_.

“I know you know their identities, Brett,” the Captain said.

Brett said nothing. He didn’t know where his loyalties lay anymore.

“And I get that you have to for them to trust you. I’m not looking to break that trust—lord knows that’s already been done for us. We need to get back into the black with these folks, Mahoney. We already got an uptick in unsolved cases and we were doing so damn well.” The Captain let out a big breath. “I’m giving you freedom. Clearance. Whatever you need. Talk to them. Reestablish trust. The last thing we need right now is for the vigilantes to go back to working against us.”

Yes, sir. He’d do his best, sir.

Foggy refused to speak to him. It was probably the biggest sign of any that the whole community knew what happened.

Brett had to find Karen. He spotted her at her usual coffee joint and felt bad as he waited outside to surprise her. It worked. She saw him and stopped dead in her tracks. Her blue eyes were ice.

“Don’t you talk to me,” she threatened with a shake in her voice that promised pain.

“I’m not here as a detective, Karen,” he said.

“No. We’re done. You guys had your chance,” she spat.

“Karen,” Brett started.

“I said no, Mahoney,” she snarled. “I said no. My friends—my everyone—they’re all having _nightmares_.”

“Karen—”

“Get out of my face. I don’t deal with pigs.”

He watched her stomp down the sidewalk, occasionally throwing fierce looks over her shoulder to see if he’d followed her. He didn’t.

There was something more going on here.

May Parker found him at the bullpen and stood outside it, staring at him until he noticed her. She ignored the officer trying to talk to her, trying to ask her what she was doing there, and kept her gaze locked on Brett.

“We _trusted_ you,” she said in the alley behind the station.

“Mrs. Parker,” he said.

“No, you let me have my piece. We trusted you—all of you. This station. You know my face, you know my nephew’s face and we have had no choice but to trust you. But that was when I didn’t have to worry that someone was going to torture my fucking child, detective.”

“Mrs. Parker,” he said as calmly as he could, “We were not aware of the damage—”

“Did you ask? Did anyone ask? Because Peter did, and you know who he had to ask, Brett? He had to ask Wade because Wade nearly died once and for all from wearing one of those damn things in the fucking _Ice Box_ , detective. He’s got stage four cancer, Brett. And this justice system put one of those things on him and left him to rot and you know what? I don’t know what would happen if someone put a collar on Peter. I don’t to know, but I can tell you right now that Pete has had broken bones and been hit and been shot by _your people_ and I can tell you for damn sure that he’s got more scar tissue in him than a soldier right now. If the mutation goes away, he could have serious mobility issues.”

Jesus.

Jesus, Peter, what were you doing, kid?

“May,” he said, “We aren’t advocating for these collars. We’ve put them away, no one wants to touch ‘em. No one _has_ touched them since we saw what happened to Jessica.”

“No,” May snapped through her tears, “Maybe you’ve stopped. But the station by our house hasn’t. And Metro Gen hasn’t.”

For fuck’s sake.

“There’s a girl on my floor who didn’t even know she was enhanced until she got arrested for being drunk and disorderly,” May said, swallowing the tears in her throat and bringing it back out as fury. “She’s twenty years old and she screamed for two hours in ICU last night before we figured out what was wrong with her. Soon as the collar came off, her body took care of it. She’d escaped from a human trafficking ring, Brett. They did that to her and every day now, she’s going to be reminded of it. People don’t _ask_ for these things to happen to them.”

He didn’t know what to say to it all. It just felt—not helpless, but more like no one knew anything about the experience. Like there wasn’t enough information floating around. Like there wasn’t anything that they could point to and say, here—this is proof that this is fucked up, it’s not just my personal experience. There are others. This is a phenomenon.

“May, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how to help right now. I’m sorry Peter is scared, really. I am. But I—I don’t have control of the system. I can’t make them stop, we can—”

“This is the point,” May said, cutting him off. “This is the exact point. This is why Spiderman exists, don’t you see that?”

Well. Yeah, he did now.

“May, I don’t know what else to tell you,” he sighed. “I can talk to—”

“I want you to do whatever needs to be done to show people that this is unacceptable,” May said. “Talk to Wade and others who’ve worn those things. Try it yourself. Try it as a group. I don’t know, just—this is barbaric. All it’s doing is make our people and ourselves feel like there’s no point in working with the police. The stakes are too high. They’ll just work harder to take care of things themselves and someone’s going to get hurt. Someone will die because of this. And god help me, we don’t have luck to spare in our family, detective. I’ve already lost my husband. Peter’s already lost his parents.”

Okay.

Okay.

He didn’t know what to do, still, but he could promise that he’d try.

“Thank you.”

Save the thank yous for when something actually happened.

**BM:** foggy

 **BM:** foggy please man, answer your phone

 **BM:** may parker found me today and we talked and I get it, man. I do.

 **BM:** I’m trying to help, but I don’t know how. I can’t just arrest people this time. could really use a second brain rn

 **FN:** stop texting me

 **BM:** fogs

 **FN:** brett my partner had a collapsed lung ten minutes ago stop fucking texting me

 **BM:** oh my god is he okay

 **FN:** no he’s not fucking okay and he refuses to go to a hospital because he’s got it in his head that someone’s going to recognize what’s going on with him in a fucking exam or in his goddamn labs and collar him

 **FN:** things have seldom been worse actually

 **FN:** getting this guy to admit that he needs to be admitted to an ER is a fucking once in the lifetime opportunity and the one time he actually wants to go, he can’t.

 **BM:** foggy no one is going to test him, take him to the ER.

 **FN:** Matt can’t filter his input when he’s on drugs and he’s got more trauma to his body than a fucking punching bag on top of the lung, brett. They will test him. And we don’t know where his mutation would make itself known. Literally nothing is safe. He’s so tired, man. I can’t leave him alone, he’s scared he’ll stop breathing.

 **BM:** foggy take him to the ER please

 **FN:** I can’t. I wish I could, I wish so badly that I could, but if they find out and turn off his senses, the shock will kill him. He hasn’t known any other reality for twenty fucking years. If he has a panic attack on top of the lung, he won’t make it.

 **BM:** take him to Stark then. The Avengers. There’s got to be someone who can help.

 **FN:** I’ve called Sam Wilson. He’s on his way. There’s no one else I can think of right now.

 **BM:** are you alone? Do you need someone to be there?

 **FN:** no. KP is here and our friend Claire. We’ll be fine, we have to be. But just

 **FN:** iim sorry man but I can’t talk to any cops right now I just can’t. I know you’re not like those other guys but I just can’t

 **BM:** no I get it. I’m sorry fogs let me know if you guys need anything. Tell Matt that he’s going to be okay.

“Any progress?” the Captain asked him the next day when his hands were shaking from the stress and caffeine.

“No, sir.”

“And progress perhaps on the horizon?”

“No. Spidey is staying out of sight and mind. DD is avoiding medical attention to avoid the risk of the collar in the ER.”

“Jesus. Is he--?”

“No word. His people are refusing to talk to me.”

The captain rubbed a hand over his face.

“This is madness,” he said.

No, sir. Brett thought, things have just been brought into clearer focus.

That night, the news reported that a child had been refused entry into a school after being found to be enhanced after a hospitalization the day prior. The school argued that they had the right to suspend a student if they posed a threat to the others attending the facility.

The boy was six years old.

Brett watched the program in a bar over the tender’s head and thought, swirling his beer bottle, that Matt had made the right call for once.

**SW:** hi detective, this is sam Wilson. things are getting a little out of hand. can we talk?

 **BM:** there is nothing I would like more than that

Matt looked like four different types of shit curled up on Captain America’s couch in Brooklyn. He was paler than Brett had ever seen him. Looked to be entering vampire territory on more than one count. Foggy glared at Brett with as much of his face as he could while Cap ducked past to adjust the blanket Matt was sleeping under when he thought no one was looking.

Sam persuaded Foggy that this was entirely a personal visit and that no one was saying jack to any cops. He then distracted him by calling JB down and sending the two of them out to go pick up lunch from this tiny hole in the wall a few blocks over. He gave JB a complicated order to follow and the guy appeared to let it all wash over him before nodding and heading out. Cap made to follow him, but Sam called him back and set him on Murdock sentry duty. He curled up behind Matt on the couch like a giant golden retriever and settled in to share his heat.

Matt didn’t wake up.

“He’s not the first,” Sam said, leaning a chin on his palm with his eyes in Matt’s direction. “He’s lucky though, his nurse friend is a-mazing. We coulda used a set of those kind of nerves on my unit.”

Steve watched the two of them from over the side of Matt’s head. Then he decided that the current amount of exposed skin on Matt’s face would not do and tugged the blanket up higher to cover the guy’s cheek.

“Our station’s ceased use of the things,” Brett sighed. “But the Queens guys say that they’re necessary and now the guys up north want to know why they don’t got ‘em.”

Sam hummed and watched Cap watch him.

“What do you think, big guy?” he asked. Steve squinted at him suspiciously.

“I think there ought to be a protest,” he said with a controlled tone, mindful of the guy he was laying next to.

“Say more, baby,” Sam said and Brett started to get the feeling that he’d orchestrated this meeting less for his benefit and more for Sam and Steve’s.

“Not much more to say. Need to convince people that these things are cruel and unusual punishment. Causing more harm than good. Hurting babies, hurting people. Hurting people indirectly, too.”

Sam hummed.

“So we should protest,” he said. “Like, hold a demonstration. Something to make some waves.”

“Yes,” Steve said with far more hesitancy than Brett thought the situation warranted. “We should protest.”

“How do you think we could it?” Sam pressed.

“Why’re you asking me? I barely got a highschool diploma,” Steve demanded.

“Babe.”

“I ain’t leading no protest.”

“Shall we count ‘em?”

“I’m not that kind of activist.”

“Let’s see, refusing orders to storm into Italy, that’s one.”

“And I ain’t wearing no damn collar, I can tell you that right now.”

“Systematically destroying SHIELD from the inside out, that’s two.”

“I ain’t doing it.”

“The Sokovian Accords. The Women’s March. The climate change march. That rally you and Buck got arrested at when you were kids. That _other_ rally just you got arrested at when you were kids. The immigration demonstration last year. Where does that get us to? Like eight? I’m sure you got more in there than that.”

Steve practically flattened himself into what little bit of the couch cushions he’d allowed himself to lay on.

“I don’t wanna,” he said.

Sam crossed his arms patiently.

“Steve, if you wear a collar, people will lose their goddamn minds. They only think it’s fine right now because it’s happening to people they don’t know.”

“I will get polio.”

“You won’t get polio. We’ve got herd immunity with polio right now.”

“No, you don’t understand, Sam, I _will_ get polio,” Steve insisted, “As soon as any of this,” he gestured to his body, “Turns off, me and polio or the fuckin’ TB are gonna be best pals. Ten minutes, I’d give it.”

“Steven. You are not going to get TB.”

“I got a compromised immune system under all this, Sammy. I am the reason herd immunity is important. I’m definitely gonna get pneumonia—I _hate_ pneumonia. You know how many times I’ve had pneumonia?”

Sam said nothing with pursed lips for a long thirty seconds. Steve pursed his lips right back and set his jaw. Then he cracked in like, record timing.

“Why can’t Tony do it?” he asked in a whine. “Why’s it always gotta be me?”

“Is Tony enhanced?”

“This is how I’m gonna die, Sam. Ask Buck. When he comes back you ask him and he’ll tell you.”

Sam said nothing. Steve grimaced at him. Sam still said nothing.

“ _Sam_ ,” Steve whined.

“What would Captain America do?” Sam said, sitting back and crossing his arms.

“Write a strongly worded letter?”

“Steven.”

“Samuel.”

“Steve, the guy you’re laying next was half an hour from a wooden box last night. What if that was Pete, huh? Wanda? JB?”

Steve groaned like a guy who’d already made up his mind but needed to at least put some effort into pretending to hold his ground.

“I hate you,” he said.

“Thank you, Cap,” Sam said tightly.

“Fuck you, Cap,” Steve said right back.

Foggy came back to Steve laid out on the floor while Brett and Sam discussed the logistics of the demonstration about to be held at the Station. He stopped in the doorway, confused, and Barnes peeked over his shoulder with interest.

“Stevie, why you on the floor?” he asked.

“’Cause of polio,” Steve moaned.


	15. many roads to rome II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Cap’s gonna do what Cap’s gonna do, I guess,” he said. “I’m not convinced it’ll work, but if it shames at least a couple of the bigger proponents, then I guess that’s at least something. Making it a controversy might make it a last resort or put it back into testing.”

“This is the worst fuckin’ idea,” JB decided with his flesh hand on Matt’s neck to keep him upright. Matt wasn’t great at being awake at the minute. He was extremely lethargic. He didn’t say a single word to Brett or even Foggy when he tried to get him to eat. He reached for Foggy’s face and when Fogs took his hands, he just pressed his forehead against his heart.

Listening. He closed his eyes and fell asleep there.

“He’ll be fine,” Sam argued when JB shook the poor guy awake lightly. “Modern medicine is incredible. Anyways, we could finally get you vaccinated Steve, someone should probably do it.”

“No, it’s not that,” JB said. “I ain’t worried ‘bout polio or that so much as I’m worried about the asthma.”

Steve made a miserable sound on the floor as though the mere memory was painful.

“The scoliosis.”

Another sob.

“The food allergies, the heart palpitations. Anemia. Partial deafness.”

“I shoulda died when I was 25,” Steve lamented.

“You shoulda died when you were twelve,” JB corrected helpfully his way. “Not to mention the second he puts that thing on, every HYDRA agent that’s ever existed is gonna crawl outta the woodwork with a knife.”

“Well, we’ll just have to protect him then,” Sam said. “This is more than just Steve, JB, you see that, right? People see Steve up there suffering, they’ll probably think twice about this shit. It’ll get people talking if nothing else. Make a huge fuss out of everything.”

“I mean, yeah,” JB conceded, “But Steve’s been consensually enhanced. Loads of these people haven’t been. That’s gotta be complicated in people’s brains. No one wants to think about that.”

Sam gave him a perfectly arched eyebrow.

“You sayin’ you should wear one, too?” he asked.

JB fell quiet, then leaned over and patted Steve on the back of his shoulder.

“I’ll protect you, pal,” he said.

“Fuck you.”

“I’m sure I got the whole list of allergies in my head somewhere. Maybe we can trigger-word it out.”

“UGH.”

People were absolutely going try to murder Cap if he went through with this, which meant that he needed some security to at least scare off the lesser wannabes. The big guys, Barnes and Sam would take care of, but in the meantime, who better to serve as eye-candy police escorts than the rogue 15th Precinct?

Brett took Sam’s idea to the Captain who stood, reading the hastily typed request in his office doorway. He flipped the page over to check the back for additional text when he was done and then blew out a breath.

“This is not what I was thinking,” he said.

Yeah, well. Brett didn’t know what else to do right now. May Parker was right. They needed someone bigger than the bureaucracy right now. Their station in particular owed it to the vigilantes, but more importantly, they, as a city, owed it to the knowing and unknowingly enhanced people among them.

“Bad publicity might slow the roll out,” Brett said.

“Cap could be in serious danger if he lets his guard down like this.”

“And that would make him no different from any of the other people getting collared,” Brett pointed out. “That’s exactly the point. If people see the enhancement as an integral part of a person, something they can’t help, then that’ll help humanize the victims.”

The Captain cupped his chin in a hand and then sighed and shook his head.

“Cap’s gonna do what Cap’s gonna do, I guess,” he said. “I’m not convinced it’ll work, but if it shames at least a couple of the bigger proponents, then I guess that’s at least something. Making it a controversy might make it a last resort or put it back into testing.”

“Is that a ‘yes,’ sir?” Brett asked.

A long pause.

“Yeah,” The Captain said, “Yes, I think it is. Mahoney, you got four officers. Make sure the poor sap doesn’t get shot.”

Roger that.

Tony Stark, Mr. Spectacle himself, leapt at the idea and arranged a whole publicity event around Cap getting collared.

Steve was not happy. Steve could not possibly be more unhappy. He didn’t even pretend to be happy for all the news cameras crammed around the bullpen. Instead, he was busy crushing Barnes’s hand in his grip and going through breathing exercises.

Steve was convinced that he was going to have an asthma attack the second the collar went on. JB hummed amicably as though this was, in fact, a distinct possibility. Sam shushed them both and said that he was prepared for this. The station had an albuterol inhaler on hand. To this, Steve said, ‘What’s that?’ And really, that was not a great start.

There were approximately two hundred bodies too many crammed around the bullpen when Goldberg stepped out from the back with shaky hands and asked Steve to please sit in the office chair provided. Steve balled his fists and sucked it up and sat as tall and proud as he could in his full Captain America suit. Goldberg carefully folded down his suit collar and the whole room lit up with flashes and people talking into microphones as he clipped the strap into place on Steve’s neck.

He moved back.

Steve lifted his head and rolled it around to feel the collar. He made a face like, ‘well, that wasn’t so bad,’ and then proceeded to have a fucking seizure on live television.

“This is the worst,” Steve slurred about an hour later, staring up the roof of his shiny new hospital room. The good news was that he was already trending on twitter.

“The worst. It’s the worst. Hey, Sam?”

“Yes, dear?”

“It’s the worst.”

“Oh, good. Thanks. I didn’t catch that before.”

Steve’s body was confused as fuck by the halted serum effects. It seemed torn between going into overdrive and trying to shrink everything back down. The doc now overseeing his case was _freaking out_. He kept scurrying in with his colleagues and asking Steve if he’d had a history of something and then scrambling off to go request yet another test.

Brett imagined that it was a lot of pressure making sure a national icon didn’t fucking die in your care.

Steve didn’t make that very easy because about two hours in, he decided that he was done with hospitals and he was going to go out and live his life, as shitty and short as it apparently wanted to be. He signed out against medical advice and took the damn subway, security team and all, home.

People flocked around and stared at him, grumpily digging his fingers between his neck and the collar, and JB, discreetly trying to sanitize the handrail he held onto, for the whole ride.

Once they finally got off the train, Brett told Sam that they’d be camped out outside of the house for the night if anything happened, to which he gestured to JB with a wide arcing arm. JB watched the arm, puzzled. Brett decided that this meant that the other two felt pretty safe at the moment. He left the guys to sleep and texted Fogs.

**BM:** hey man, you doing okay? How’s matt?

 **FN:** hey, we’re alright. He’s a little more awake today. Says he’s just drained is all.

 **BM:** glad to hear it. You see the news by chance?

 **FN:** yeah

 **FN:** man I’m sorry I was an asshole. It’s not your fault that any of this happened, you don’t have to go through all this

 **BM:** it’s not just for you guys Fogs. Sometimes, things are just wrong. And anyways, you can thank May Parker, she’s the one who really convinced me.

 **FN:** aw, may.

 **FN:** well thanks anyways man. Matty’s real emotional about it. Says he won’t let anyone fuck with your car anymore

 **BM:** sure thing

 **BM:** WAIT

 **BM:** HE KNOWS WHOS BEEN FUCKING WITH MY CAR???

 **FN:** lol yeah

 **BM:** goddamnit matt. I’ve been paying for that shit out of pocket

 **FN:** <3 <3 <3

Brett was surprised to come back onto guard duty the next morning to find that Wade Wilson had stormed his way into the Cap residence and was very busily pacing and calling Cap every synonym for the word ‘idiot’ he could think of. When he ran out, he started in on variations of ‘fucker.’

Wade was of the opinion that Cap was suicidal. He told him to take the collar off immediately.

“You’ve made your point,” he said, “Twitter is all about it. You got like, six elementary schools staging a walk out. But this is insane. This is me-levels of insane.”

That testimony should have been used in the publicity fliers. If Wade Wilson declared something unacceptable, it had to be up there with war crimes.

Peter snuck through the paparazzi outside Cap’s house a little later in the day and similarly pleaded with him to take it off.

“You’re gonna get sick,” he said. “What if you get bad-sick? What if you get hurt?”

Steve waved tiredly at JB and then at Sam.

“First line of defense,” he explained, “Paramedic.”

The other guys were fairly chill about it. Peter was not convinced.

“It would be better with group action,” he argued. “We could all wear them in solidarity.”

Wade reentered the house to pick Peter up and remove him from the situation entirely. That was how bad of an idea he thought the whole thing was. Brett kind of had to agree with him. It was enough of a production looking after Cap. Three people had already tried to break the house’s windows to end him and it wasn’t even lunch yet. JB had caught one of the arms when it came through and had gone out front to make an example out of him for the cameras.

There was no way the city could look after multiple known enhanced folks. Not to mention that Peter didn’t know what the collar felt like.

Steve seemed pretty fucking miserable in it, although he was putting on a good face. He kept arching his back and clearing his throat. Every so often, he rested his head against JB’s shoulder and closed his eyes to take a few shuddery breaths.

Brett couldn’t imagine what Wade would feel like with one of those things around his neck. Then he didn’t have to.

“Cancer, Spidey. Stage Four. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t move, can’t shit. Everything hurts, shit you didn’t even know could hurt, hurts. Breathing is exhausting. Opening your eyes feels like death. Is that what you want to subject me to? In solidarity? What about Red, huh? Cut off everything for him? Can’t see shit, can’t recognize any sounds anymore? It’d be like he woke up on another fuckin’ planet, kid. Think about what you’re askin’ for.”

Peter was appropriately cowed.

“I’ll wear one then,” he sniffed. “Just me. I’ll wear it in the suit. Take some pictures, post ‘em on social media.”

“You will _not_ ,” Sam snapped at him. Peter set his jaw.

“Why not?”

“We don’t know what your body’s doing right now, Peter. If you’re still healing from something, you’re gonna end up like Jones.”

“I’m not,” Peter argued. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t know that,” Wade said. Peter glared at him.

“I do.”

“Kid.”

“Pete, it’s fine,” Steve said with his eyes closed and forehead against Barnes’s metal arm. “It’s gotta be me.”

“Why? Why’s it gotta be you?” Peter demanded.

“’Cause I said so,” Steve said irritably. The backtracked. “’Cause more people know me than know you. And if you took it off and just went back to normal, that’s not gonna cause a sensation.”

Peter chewed on that furiously.

“So what? You’re gonna go out and get hit by a bus or something? Is that your plan here?” he asked.

“No,” Steve gritted out, “I’m gonna get fucking _pneumonia_. You just wait.”

Steve didn’t get pneumonia, bless him. That would have been too kind too soon. Instead, Brett got to watch Sam execute an Epipen with terrifying precision and efficiency in the middle of Starbucks because it turned out that Cap had a peanut allergy which he was now furious about. There was an instant replay of this at a charity thing later that afternoon, when it was discovered that he had an almond allergy too. He then decided to forsake all tree nuts and told the universe to fuck off, he was switching over to grains only.

He went out with JB and Sam to their usual running spot and resolved to take it slow with Sam for once. About one lap in, he started wheezing and gasping and clutching at his chest and everyone in the park (and their goddamn phones--so basically anyone with an internet connection) got to watch Steve look like he was having a heart attack while JB reverted back to 1930s Bucky Barnes in a matter of milliseconds. He threw his hands up over his head and kept saying, “Big arms, Stevie. Big arms.”

This, Brett learned later, was an entreaty to Steve to get his arms over his head to give his lungs more room to expand because the 1930s didn’t have albuterol. He only learned it later because Sam stood back after having attacked his man with an inhaler to watch JB herd Steve away from every stone, pebble, and minor inconvenience that he could while Steve threatened to maim him in the middle of the goddamn park.

Steve was happy to be miserable, but only on his terms. The second anyone else implied he was anything but perfectly capable and healthy, he spun around, fully determined to prove them wrong by doing exactly what would kill him.

“You know, Buck’s got these major anxiety triggers,” Sam said, watching JB physically drag Steve away from a weed nestled in the hedge which would allegedly make him break out in hives. “And I feel like I’ve finally found the root of it all.”

Steve eventually decided fuck all this, he was gonna go jump off the pier. JB informed him at full-volume that he was _not_. Even after all these years, it seemed that JB hadn’t learned a damn thing. Steve froze in place and stared at him dead in the eye. And then made a break straight for the park fountain.

On the upside, there was now a load of people waving signs and chanting in front of a handful of police stations throughout the city.

Steve was determined to test the absolute limits of his regained fragility and every Avenger Brett had met and many he hadn’t were suddenly extremely involved in Steve’s life. Brett had never been privy to this higher level of super-people. Standing guard over Captain America in a room full of the most capable super-people the world had ever seen (and Barton) felt a little unnecessary. Still though, it allowed him to watch Steve get pissed off at something Stark was saying and reach over to grab a granola bar to just test his luck.

The Black Widow snatched it out of his hand before he could even get the packaging open. He mugged at her hard and she gave him a warning eye which Brett was pretty sure had resulted in the deaths of multiple human beings. Steve grumbled about it.

It was decided in this meeting that part of the team would go out to investigate a concerning operation happening just behind the border in Maine. The other part was waiting for Thor, since he’d called in at 4am to say he had something which he required support with. Steve lit up and said he was great at camping.

Everyone in the room looked at him flatly and then went back to their business. Barton gave Steve a shitty drawing of his dog as a consolation prize.

Steve threw it at him.

JB woke up at the following scuffle and sat up and sniffed. He effectively separated the two of them with this feat alone.

And then Thor finally showed up and everything went to shit.

Thor, Brett now knew, was the horrible big brother figure among the Avengers. He saw Cap and Cap saw him and they both beamed at each other.

Thor had not gotten the memo regarding Steve’s new hideous accessory. He thought it was charming. He asked where he could get one. He then told Steve he had a job which he was gonna _love_ and everyone in the room went from far too relaxed to on high alert.

Thor told Steve that they were going to go fight a sea monster and Steve had never been happier in his goddamn life. He had a head full of sea-fantasies.

“My dad was a sailor,” he bubbled to Thor. “It’s in my blood.”

JB was horrified.

“We’re not doing any of that,” he announced stiffly. Thor blinked at him. Steve stared at him like he hated him. “Steve’s immune-compromised, big guy. He ain’t going near no toxic water or krakens or none of that shit. He sure as shit ain’t doing no submarine business.”

Steve’s jaw said ‘watch me.’

Brett decided then that Sam Wilson was the strongest, most patient man he knew; he had to be to put up with these two day in and day out.

“There are no submarines,” Thor said. Then to Steve he said, “This is fine. We will lure it ashore.”

Getting Captain America to not be Captain America in the face of a potential sea monster was like trying to turn a German shepherd into a corgi. It didn’t work. Sam told Steve that he was going take the shield for this one and Steve decided that that was cool, he’d take the stealth suit. Barnes told Steve that, bummer man, _he_ was taking the Cap stealth suit, and Steve said, aight, I’ll borrow Nat’s.

Natasha Romanova was going to break Steve’s neck in the near future, Brett was sure of it. She said that he couldn’t borrow it, A. because it was still stretched out from the last time she let one of them giant bozos touch her things and B. because Barton was wearing it.

This was news to Barton. He gaped at her and then at Steve and then at Brett like he had anything to do with this situation. He pointed from himself to Nat while staring at Brett in his bullet proof vest, and all Brett could really do was shrug.

Steve said he saw what they were all doing and that was fine, he’d just go in a t-shirt and jeans and Thor celebrated this as optimal kraken-fighting attire.

Again. Thor?

Trouble.

Thor was above-ground Wade. Thor went into any situation and made it worse. But with great enthusiasm and unprecedented expertise. Tony Stark was the one who pulled shit back to base for a fucking surprise by saying, “No. Rogers, you’re staying with Bruce. Your death will not make people drop the collars, it will just make them think you’re an idiot wearing one.”

Steve mugged at him, too. Stark gave him challenging hands.

“Where is the lie?” he demanded.

“The point,” Steve huffed, “Is to show how dangerous the collar is. What better way to do that then show how useless I am in battle with it on?”

Brett felt like this was a crazy argument. But he was not here to talk. He was here to guard.

“I got a better way,” Barnes said. “Let’s just wait two more days and when you get typhus, the job’ll be done for you.”

“Too hard to get typhus these days, Buck, I’m counting on measles,” Steve volleyed back nastily.

JB didn’t think he was funny. Barton did. The Black Widow punched him in the shoulder without looking at him and that made him stop laughing by making him clutch at his arm in pain.

“You’re not going, Rogers, I’m sorry. Go stand in traffic or something if you want to be grievously injured,” Stark said with a dismissive wave. “Everyone else, suit up.”

Brett was pretty sure that Amos would pass out if he knew that Brett had just witnessed an Avengers team break. But he couldn’t focus on that for too long because his target was moving and whispering into Thor’s ear. Thor whispered something back and Brett’s gut sank. Thor patted Cap on the back and nodded and Steve broke away from the others back towards the elevator. He looked expectantly back at Brett and the other guards.

“You coming?” he asked.

Oh god, oh no. Oh, god.

This guy was going to make himself bait for a sea monster.

“Cap, listen,” Brett negotiated on behalf of himself and the other three guards. “This is _highly_ irresponsible.”

“Mahoney, you are talking to the wrong person if you think I have ever given a shit about being responsible.”

Brett was.

Brett was.

Brett couldn’t believe he was saying this, but he was gonna call Matt. He needed superpeople advice. Now.

“Matt,” he hissed into the phone a safe hundred or so yards away from the action, “Captain fucking America is fishing for a fucking _kraken_ with his goddamn hands.”

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

“Doesn’t he have like, a heart condition?” Matt asked. He sounded much better than he had the other day.

“Probably,” Brett said, “But that’s not the main problem right now. How the _fuck_ do I move someone at this level of dumb-fuck?”

Matt made a thoughtful noise and then called over his shoulder to bounce the question off Foggy. Foggy made highly concerned sounds in the background.

“Fogs thinks that you should tell Barnes exactly what he’s doing, but _I_ think your main object here is distraction.”

Distraction? What did that mean?

“Well, he’s out to prove a point isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, so let him prove it. Or suffer the consequences, I guess.”

“Matt, I need you to talk like a real life person instead of in secrets right now,” Brett hissed, glancing behind him to where Steve looked like he was getting ready to hop off the dock at any second. “Time is of the essence.”

“Okay, okay. Where are you?”

He rattled off the location.

“Alright. Okay. Uh. Okay, I’ll be there.”

Wait, what?

“Matthew, you are one week out from a collapsed lung, you’re not going anywhere. Just tell me what to do.”

“I’m gonna fight him?”

“WHAT.”

“I mean it’s me or my ex, so?”

“SEND YOUR EX.”

“Oh, no. She’ll just kill him. Oh. Wait, don’t worry, I got this.”

He hung up and Brett was left holding his phone wondering if he was seriously going to have to tackle Captain America.

He decided to try reasoning with him first.

“Steve, if the point here is to achieve peak suffering, then you at least need an audience,” he said while the other officers stared at him in horror.

Steve considered this with both hands on the edge of the dock. He shrugged.

“It’ll get to the papers in time, it always does,” he said.

“You know, if you’re the one instigating this, you’re not going to look like a martyr,” Brett tried next.

“No, I will. Trust me.”

“What do you think Sam thinks of this, huh?”

“Sam’s not fucking me ‘cause I’m a genius. He’s only got himself to blame if he’s disappointed.”

God.

This fucking guy. Who the hell chose him to be Captain-America-fied? What the hell had Erskine been thinking?

He heard the splash before he saw it, but when he did, he was surprised. That was Matt, not Steve, standing at the edge of the dock now. All wrapped up in his black pajamas, innocently peering down into the water. Cap broke the surface shortly after, sputtering. He swore and jolted when Matt grabbed the back of his shirt and dragged him in closer.

“The hell are you doing?” he coughed. “You’ve got a bum lung.”

Matt went still, then cocked his head.

“And you’ve got two,” he said. Then half-hauled Cap up out of the water and shoved his face hard against the wood of the door. His fingers scrabbled at something behind Cap’s head and then Cap yelped and tried to grab him, but whatever it was they were fussing over, it was too late. Matt spun up into standing and gunned it down the dock. Cap threw himself out of the water and started to go charging after and it was only then that Brett realized what it was Matt had done.

He’s stolen the collar.

Sam couldn’t seem to decide if he was going to throttle Steve or congratulate him when this news was conveyed to the Avengers team who’d arrived on the scene to go investigate the kraken hunting business. Stark just started to bust a gut. Seemed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in years.

Thor was delighted by his delight.

“The red horned one took it?” he clarified. Steve made a sad noise and mimed nothing being in his hands. JB started cackling. He had absolutely not taken the stealth suit.

“What does this mean?” Thor asked Steve who made an even sadder noise at the realization that this was now an even bigger problem than anticipated.

“I need that thing back,” he said, “I _need_ it. Protests don’t work if people cross the fucking picket line.”

“How’d he even get it off you?” Sam asked. “It needs a code.”

“He knew the code,” Steve said dolefully.

“How could he know the code? It’s a police code, right detective?”

Indeed it was. How _had_ Matt known the code? And why steal the collar after telling Brett he was going to fight Cap? Was there an abrupt change of plans?

“Maybe DD figured it from the tv footage or something?” JB thought out loud. “If not him, then one of his associates.”

There was a sudden pause on the Avengers team, and then everyone looked right at Stark. His eyes widened like a cat’s in realization.

“He’s not my kid,” he suddenly said. “I am not responsible for him or any of his actions.”

Oh, no.

Peter.

Steve, once again at full functioning capacity, decided that he needed to catch Matt before he handed the collar off to some other vigilante. He ran off to go do that and JB looked around wildly for a moment at his departure, and then chased after, telling him that DD wasn’t that easily caught.

“Someone needs to go with those two or they’re gonna make a scene,” The Black Widow said evenly.

Sam sighed gustily.

“I’ll do it!” Barton announced, hand held high. “Me and Red are best friends now. He tried to maim my dog last week.”

Uh.

“Alright, bye,” Natasha said. Barton fist pumped and took off after the first two.

“Nat,” Sam said slowly, “Were we trying _not_ to make a scene or?”

“Hmm? Oh, well if there’s three of them that’s fine then, isn’t it? If it’s just Steve and James, that’s one thing, but if Barton’s in there, people will assume it’s his incompetence that got them into this mess.”

Where those two friends? Brett thought they were friends. They’d seemed like friends and partners the other week, but maybe not? Maybe the Widow secretly hated Barton?

“Hey, are we still finding the fish or nah?” Stark asked. “Detective Mahoney can take those guys from here, can’t he?”

Well. Yeah. Brett guessed that he could.

Brett strongly doubted that Matt had thought far enough ahead to have any especially solid plan, although he had apparently thought far enough ahead to get Peter to somehow figure out the collar’s code.

That was one step, but Matt’s planning skills didn’t typically go too far beyond that, which meant that he’d probably—

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

Steve held clawed hands at face-level as Peter, in full Spidey suit, swung past them all in the street lightning-fast. He did not look back. Which meant—

Matt popped up at Brett’s shoulder and gave him a damn heart attack. Steve got hands on him within seconds and literally held him up to eye level.

“Get it back,” he ordered. Matt looked very small in his enormous hands.

“But you lost it,” Matt said innocently.

“I am _trying_ to do something here, Double D,” Steve gritted out.

“Oh. Coincidence. So are we,” Matt said cheerfully, kind of swinging his feet.

“What could you possibly be doing?” Steve demanded.

Matt beamed at him like he hadn’t been actively dying on the guy’s couch the week before. He looked beyond silly in the black pajamas in daytime. People had started to gather around the pavement to see why Captain America was shaking the shit out of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.

“Well,” Matt said good-naturedly, ignoring their audience, “The problem is that the thing is scary, right? So we figured that if we all got to handle it, it wouldn’t be so scary.”

JB started cackling again. Steve did not put Matt down. He just stared at him in disbelief.

“This does not solve the problem,” he said.

“No, and neither will you being a martyr,” Matt hummed. “If enhanced people are supposed to be treated as people, then it’s better to just sue and take it to trial. Get it in legal code rather than just in social etiquette. Social etiquette changes all the time. And until it’s made illegal, we’re just gonna see more and more of those devices popping up. The root,” he said with a finger in Steve’s face, “Is that we are not seen as people. That,” he pointed in the direction that Peter had swung in, “Is a symptom.”

Steve set him down.

“You’re kinda smart, you know that?” he said.

Matt wriggled in pleasure at the praise. Captain America praise no less. He was definitely going to lord that over Foggy.

“I have two degrees,” he said proudly.

“Yeah, I bet you do,” Steve said absently, looking off in the distance. “Where’s he taking it then?”

“Ah. To Iron Fist, I think.”

“To?”

“Touch.”

“Right. So do I get it back?”

“Dunno,” Matt said simply. “Jess might destroy it on contact. Same with Wade.”

“So, is this not my problem anymore?” Steve asked honestly. He sounded a little happy about it.

“Well, it is stolen police property now,” Matt admitted. “So if you care about that, you might go after it. Otherwise,” he gave Steve a sunny smile, “We can try to have it back to you by five?”

Steve considered this.

“Yeah, alright,” he said. “You know where I live.”

Brett had not been expecting this. Brett had been expecting a long, drawn out month’s worth of demonstrations filled with rioters and protestors and people condemning the dehumanization of enhanced persons. He expected to be dedicating several teams to demonstrations over the next few weeks or so.

And to be fair, they had some of that.

But what he was entirely unprepared for was for a load of vigilantes to steal the object of fear, crack it against a few rocks, figure out how it works, and then hand it back tenderly to the police. The act in itself said, without a doubt, that they’d not only figured out how the collars worked, but they’d figured out how to override them and break out of them.

Nice try, guys, but we ain’t scared of that anymore.

It was surprisingly straightforward. They literally just got ahead of the curve.

Someone (Peter, obviously) leaked the information online for how to disable the collars. And Peter then retweeted this information to his Spiderman twitter account and before long, half the damn city of the New York knew how to disable the damn things.

It made the device itself practically useless.

Brett couldn’t tell if what he was feeling was relief or awe or frustration at having spent weeks trying to grapple with the metaphysics of this problem, only for it to be solved by a couple of criminals with a few lab hours on their hands.

Cap wasn’t all that bothered about his failed protest. In fact, Cap was just happy that he no longer had to wear the damn thing. He explained to Brett later that sometimes this was just how things worked in activism. Sometimes you do something and it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. All the feeling is there, but when it comes to addressing the base of a problem, sometimes you really do have to yield to those who knew more about the subject at hand.

The vigilantes of the city knew more about street-level fear and fear mongering than Cap did. They spent every day of their lives trying to sort through their own insecurities and the insecurities of others and trying to figure out how to make both work to their benefit. This behavior was an extension of that. They had more practice than the people up top at doing it and they were the ones more likely to be affected by the collars, so it kind of made sense to sit back and let them handle this the way they were used to.

Steve then, was more than happy to hand off the burden. Although he did leave Brett to go have a word with Peter about being an angry reckless shithead which Brett now thought, having spent the last week or so in the guy’s company, he was absolutely the worst person for.

When he got back to the station that night to stow away the bullet proof vest, he saw that the box of collars which had sat on the table outside the Captain’s office were gone.

That was validating, if nothing else.

He then went home to take a shower to sluice the stress of the last two weeks down the drain.


	16. bring on the spirits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m going to commit homicide,” Foggy decided out of nowhere.  
> “Alright, you go do that,” Brett said. “Don’t give them my name when they bring you in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HAVE FINISHED MY THESIS ANNUAL REVIEW CHAPTER  
> Thank Jesus. This means I now have a week to sit on my thumbs and go to a conference before getting grilled on it. 
> 
> FUN. 
> 
> Anyways, it's summer. I want some ghosts. Here are some ghosts, or rather, a load of people trying to banish a load of ghosts. Just as a note, I adore Karen and Danny (and Clint, too, don't worry). I harass them out of deep affection.  
> Also, Father Lantom is not dead in this verse. I found his death in DDS3 to be kind of silly although I understand why they did it. Matt is allowed to have both Sister Maggie and Father Lantom. We do not always have to be dark and edgy, people.

Coming off the collar situation, Brett wasn’t surprised to find the night crew laying low over the next couple of weeks. Just because they’d out-smarted the developers of the thing didn’t mean that they weren’t still spooked by the whole series of events.

Or so Brett thought.

His assumption began to be amended when Foggy arrived to bodily drag him away from his desk in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, when both of them were supposed to be doing their damn jobs.

“Brett,” Foggy said seriously, in the eye-searing sunlight two blocks away from the station. “This shit has gone on long enough.”

Which shit? Brett had innumerable piles of shit around him at all times. He was gonna have to be more specific.

“The ghost shit,” Foggy said with his hands. “The fucking ghost shit, man. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good ghost hunt, but this? This is just getting out of hand.”

Woah. Okay. Back-track. What ghost shit?

Foggy stared at him emptily for three long beats. Then glared out into the street in abrupt cold fury. So cold he didn’t even seem to be sweating in his suit, despite the heat from the sun and the heat wafting up from the pavement.

“I’m going to commit homicide,” he decided out of nowhere.

“Alright, you go do that,” Brett said. “Don’t give them my name when they bring you in.”

“Nope, you’re now my accomplice,” Foggy said. “Come on. We’re going.”

“What? No, man. I’ve still got fours on my shift.”

Foggy’s eyes were almost grey in the piercing sunlight.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. Or rather, threatened.

Every summer of highschool, Brett had fallen prey to these very eyes and those very words. And because back then, he had had maybe half the backbone that he had presently, he’d given into the inevitable fairly easily, although not without the requisite moaning. In the absence of multiple bits of metal littered around Foggy’s face, Brett felt a little more courageous in the face of this new version of the inevitable.

“No,” he said. “I’m not going, Fogs. We did the ghost thing, we did _years_ of ghost things. We’ve done enough ghost things for a lifetime.”

“This isn’t a just ghost thing, Mahoney. This is homicide,” Foggy said.

Oh, yes. How could he have forgotten?

“Man, who are you trying to kill?” Brett asked, hating the answer already.

“Karen.”

Unexpected. But okay.

“She’s your firm partner, Foggy. You cannot kill your firm partner, you will be the first suspect.”

“You don’t know that. We’ll make it look like Frank did it. Come on, I’m a lawyer, you’re a cop. We cannot fail.”

This was the start to a horrifically bad comedy.

“No,” Brett said. “We can fail. We can very much fail. Very badly. Look, obviously you’re upset about something, so why don’t we grab a beer and—”

“If you do not come with me right now, I’ll just murder her on my own and move to Georgia.”

This fucking guy was always going on and on about how dramatic Matt was and yet here he was, threatening to destroy his own life for Brett’s goddamn attention. Fine. Whatever. He’d bite.

“What, pray tell, has Karen done which warrants her untimely demise?” Brett asked magnanimously.

“Ghost things,” Foggy said immediately.

“You know mud?” Brett asked him. “That’s how clear you’re being right now.”

“It’s doesn’t matter, man. Are you in or are you out?” Foggy demanded. And it was exactly like they were back in fucking highschool, standing outside the school gates in converse sneakers.

Brett felt bullied. Peer-pressured.

He needed an adult.

UGH.

“We’re _not_ committing homicide,” Brett said with a menacing finger.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever, come _on_ ,” Foggy said.

Maynard and Ellen stared at him in silent shock when he came back into the station and said that he had to take a half day.

“We’re in the middle of a case,” Maynard said.

“And I understand that,” Brett said.

“But we got shit to do,” Foggy finished for him, flagrantly ignoring his promise to shut the fuck up and let Brett handle this.

Maynard and Ellen stared at Brett with eyes that spoke of disappointment. ‘You continue to fraternize with the enemy’ that set of brown eyes said.

It’s not like he wanted to. It just—they’d never been on the opposite side of Foggy’s bullying, okay? He was a dick and a force of nature, and no one would ever believe Brett because Foggy looked, at his most furious, like an offended shih tzu. No one would ever understand.

When they were eight, Foggy had completely intentionally let Brett fall from the monkey bars and sprain his wrist because he refused to be ‘it’ in their game of tag. And then, when they were fifteen and Brett had gotten a crush on this girl Carrie in their class, Foggy had stared at him silently and pointedly every time he mentioned her. And most importantly in that particular scenario, even though he was friends with the girl, Fogs had specifically chosen not to tell Brett that Carrie couldn’t ever remember his fucking name, despite the fact that they sat together in Spanish. So when Brett finally worked up the nerve to ask Carrie out, Fogs stood by and fucking let her call him ‘Brandon,’ when she accepted.

It was bullying. It didn’t look like bullying. But it was bullying.

Psychological torture.

It was either that or admitting that he had maybe not been the most graceful social being as a child and Brett refused to suffer such insult.

“Brett, you are not taking a half day to go play cops and robbers with this guy,” Maynard said.

“It’s not a joy ride, it’s—” Brett started.

“Murder,” Foggy finished for him.

Their half of the bullpen went quiet. All eyes on them.

“I’m sorry, _what_?” Ellen squeaked.

“Homicide,” Foggy clarified for her. Brett closed his eyes. One time. He needed this guy to shut up this _one_ time.

“BRETT,” Ellen barked in alarm.

“He’s being a dick,” Brett said. “We are not going to commit—”

“Potentially double homicide, we’ll know better when we get there,” Foggy said.

Their half of the station remained horrified.

“Foggy’s cousin’s in some shit,” Brett lied. And then before the fuckhead could ruin it, he said “We’re going to go make sure she’s not hurt.”

The relief on everyone’s faces was gratifying. The heart clutching was, too.

“I’m going to strangle the guy who touched her with my bare hands,” Foggy assured Ellen and Maynard cheerfully; he always game to distort reality, so long as he wasn’t the one who’d be blamed for it when they got caught.

“Okay, uh. Well, maybe don’t do that,” Maynard said. “Hope she’s okay.”

Ah, she’d be fine. Brett? Not so much.

“Dude, you made me lie to my coworkers, what the actual fuck is going on?” Brett demanded as Fogs dragged him down the street by his sleeve. He didn’t say. Was too determined to get them to the secondary location in his head.

Brett realized belatedly that they looked like a mobile kidnapping situation. He ripped his arm back and at Foggy’s exasperated whine, told him to chill the fuck out and explain himself.

And then he had an aneurysm because fingers danced along his shoulders and he turned around and nearly decked Matt in the middle of the sidewalk. He did not, thank god. Because that would look not just bad, but horrendous for everyone involved.

“Ghosts,” Matt said when Brett threatened him like he’d threatened his partner.

“Ghosts,” Brett repeated, just to be sure he’d heard right.

“Ghosts,” Matt said again, and Brett realized that he was being extremely serious about this. And, actually, that wasn’t seriousness, that was…anxiety?

For real?

“Matt, there is no such thing as ghosts,” he said. Matt glared at him and slunk away to attach himself to Foggy’s arm. He said nothing. Foggy gave Brett flat eyebrows for both of them.

“We gotta kill Karen,” Foggy reiterated.

They did not need to kill Karen.

“The office is haunted,” Matt said tightly.

What, now?

“It’s haunted,” Matt insisted. “There are feet in there with no heartbeats.”

Woah.

Wait, no. Get yourself together, Mahoney. They’re fucking with you.

“This isn’t funny, you two,” he snapped.

“I _know_ ,” Matt said. “My priest doesn’t believe me.”

“You told your priest?” Brett asked.

“Yes, but he keeps saying that even if they are real, they’re probably just lost souls, which is fine, but honestly? I don’t care what kind of souls they are, they need to fucking go.”

Brett needed a second here. Matt sounded like he actually believed what he was saying right now. And he’d talked to his priest about this and that seemed to be going a little far, even for him.

“Why do we have to kill Karen, then?” Brett asked Foggy. Matt jerked and turned towards Fogs in shock. So he evidently hadn’t been in on that discussion or been listening the first time around.

“We’ve gotta kill Karen?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Foggy said.

“Why?”

“’Cause she brought ‘em in.”

Matt didn’t like that. Didn’t want to believe that. His knuckles tensed around the handle of his cane.

“She didn’t—she wouldn’t—she _said_ —”

“She _lied_ , Matty. It wasn’t a boardgame, it was a Oija board, like I _told_ you it was. I don’t know why you’re in denial of this.”

There was a pause between the two of them.

“Foggy, I don’t want to kill Karen,” Matt said delicately.

Foggy had no time for this nonsense.

“Tough,” he said in his bully voice.

It took some prodding and a whole lot of frustration on everyone’s part, but Brett eventually got the whole story here.

It was summer and summer reminded Karen of living in Bumfuck Nowhere, Vermont and that reminded her of fireflies and camping and all that shit together reminded her that she was a sadist with two captive victims at her disposal.

Karen was way into ghost hunting and the occult during the warmer months and she had been trying to sneak some of that shit into the offices of Nelson, Murdock & Page so as to ensure that she was not the only one experiencing whatever it was that she was conjuring. She had tried to get Castle to endure this shit with her, but Castle had the good, Catholic sense not to put up with that shit. He bailed early and was presently refusing to take Karen’s calls. Peter and his friends, it turned out, were usually game to feed Karen’s impulses because they were going through that fun teenage phase of seeking out reasons to be scared shitless, like Brett and Foggy had done all those years ago.

But whatever it was that Karen was messing with had gotten too much for the Spidey crew, because they bailed like Castle had and had complained to Matt that his bestie was making them all too afraid to sleep alone at night.

Matt had told Karen to tone down the ghost stories and she had, as she was wont, heard that as ‘ramp it up.’

There was a reason that she was Matt’s other best friend.

But Karen had apparently failed to consider the fact that the Devil was maybe a teensy-weensy bit terrified of the supernatural like his gun-toting, Catholic compatriot and so apparently had snuck a Ouija board into the office without Foggy or Matt’s intervention. She’d stayed late the last Friday and the other two had thought nothing of it, until Matt realized that he’d forgotten something at the office on Sunday and had stopped by after church to grab it, only to realize that people were inside the place. Given the fact that only three people had keys to the office and, as far as he knew, he was the only key-holder there, he prepared himself to handle a load of burglars. Only, when he opened the door, he found no burglars. No anyone, actually. Not a trace, not a smell. Nothing.

But he swore he’d heard voices and footsteps.

He’d written this off as a misplaced sound. He explained to Brett that sometimes, his hearing confused him because if he didn’t focus on it, he fell into the habit of just assuming that sounds which were loud to him were close by. That correlation didn’t always work in real life.

But then on Monday, Matt and Foggy had come in early and had heard the same sounds. Foggy had heard them, too, and so asked Matt to see if he could tell more about the people they were about to call the cops on. But Matt got confused because he couldn’t hear any heartbeats, even when he pressed his head against the door. With the number of feet moving around, he was adamant that he would have at least been able to catch a snippet of someone’s heart beating. And yet there was nothing. And by that point, Matt was freaking out so that he could only hear his own heartbeat, so they’d resolved to open the door and deal with a load of potential assailants.

But there was no one in the place.

Karen arrived afterwards and blew the whole thing off, but throughout the next couple of days, Fogs had felt his hair being fucked with and Matt kept coming out and moving around people in the waiting room who he didn’t realize weren’t there. And apparently, that whole morning, the office had been cold enough to see your breath.

And Foggy was understandably fucking done. And Matt was, for once, naively hopeful that it would pass if they just ignored it long enough. The role reversal was extremely entertaining. But more importantly, Brett wanted nothing to do with this shitshow.

Nothing.

Nope.

He did not fuck with the supernatural. He had learned from his experiences in childhood that nothing good ever came of that.

But still, he wasn’t convinced that throttling Karen was the solution to this problem here. Maybe just getting her to admit what she’d done would be sufficient for them to find a way to undo it.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Foggy said.

No, sir. That’s what you’re saying now that you’ve put a mile between yourself and your haunted workplace. There had definitely been talk of homicide prior to this.

“Okay, so I overreacted, whatever,” Foggy admitted. “The point is that we can’t live like this for any longer, or I’m gonna explode.”

Evidently.

“Okay, so where is Karen?” Brett asked.

“She took the day,” Matt said.

Of course she did.

“Can you find Karen?” Brett tried. Matt didn’t seem to be in a Daredevil-like mood. In fact, he seemed very much to have laid that whole ‘man without fear’ thing aside for the moment, which was so uncharacteristic that Brett felt kind of sorry for him.

“Maybe,” Matt said. “But she’s not at home, I already checked there.”

“Maybe with Castle then?” Brett offered. Matt shrugged weakly.

“He’s really not into ghosts,” Brett murmured to Foggy as they set off to find Castle and maybe Karen.

“No, he grew up in a haunted orphanage,” Foggy muttered back. “And he has a hard time telling when things are real and fake with this stuff, ‘cause you know, he can’t just see that it’s nothing like we can.”

Fuck that. God, no. Brett really did for sorry for the guy now.

Castle was unusually patient with Matt when he finally nosed him out of hiding. He did not begin the conversation with the usual rain of insults or bullets.

“I told her not to mess with that shit,” Castle said, shaking his head. “I told her, but there’s so much shit online and you know how it is. Tell her not to do something and she’s guaranteed to do it out of spite.”

But Karen wasn’t with him and no, Castle hadn’t seen her since Friday last. He did confirm that he’d noticed her eyeing up Ouija boards online the week before. He’d confiscated the phone while she was with him, but obviously the masculine censoring didn’t go down well and so she’d left pretty pissed off.

Castle thought that there was a chance that she was off with her friend Patricia Walker, Jessica Jones’s adopted sister.

“That girl has got a crush on her that you can see from space,” Castle said, allowing Matt to wrap a rosary around his wrist before they left. “She’d do anything for Kare’s approval. Maybe she cajoled her into being her accomplice.”

Now that sounded pretty Karen-like. It was as good a lead as any.

Matt didn’t actually know Jessica Jones’s sister. Foggy had only met her once and briefly. But they both knew Jessica and Jessica answered the door with half her usual level of attitude for them. A little desperately, actually, now that Brett thought about it.

“Thank fuck you’re here,” Jessica said. “Danny thinks the place is haunted and I need someone to get him out of my goddamn walls.”

Rand was not just insistent that the place was cursed, he was damn sure of it and he’d taken out the drywall next to a closet, to Jones’s associate Malcolm’s despair, and was now rooting around the space between the walls, trying to find what he seemed to think was the source of the evil.

He had with him a mixture of herbs and incense that was burning lightly and the whole place smelled strongly of ginseng.

Malcolm, bless him, appeared to have been bargaining with Rand for quite a while by the time they got there, trying to lure him back out of the dark with various promises.

“I called Colleen, but she says that it’s easier for her to just let him be weird sometimes,” Jones huffed. “Luke tried to pull him out before he left for work, but you can see how well that’s worked.”

“Do you think your place is haunted?” Brett asked her. She gave him a weird look.

“Duh?” she said. “I’m here.”

Uh. Was that supposed to be a joke?

A noise brought both of their attention back to the wall and they saw that Malcolm and Foggy were now both trying to call Matt back.

“Oh, perfect,” Jones said. “We’ll just flush one idiot out with the other, why didn’t I think of that?”

Were she and Matt friends? It was hard to tell.

There was a scrape at the wall near them and then a scuffle and a muffled scream which had to be Rand since Matt knew exactly who he was looking for.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Matt’s muffled voice chided. “Put that shit out. That’s for sick folks.”

Brett looked at Foggy who shrugged.

“They _are_ sick folks,” Rand’s muffled voice snipped back. “They’ve got a sick baby.”

“No,” Matt said, “They’ve got a sick no one and a dead everyone. Now put that out, it ain’t helping jack.”

Brett didn’t really understand until Jones asked him if he really didn’t know that Rand and Matt came from somewhat similar cultish upbringings . Then he had only more questions about the level of crossover that occurred between those respective cults and then he had questions about how the hell Matt and Danny were so drastically and emphatically not the same kind of cultish martial artists.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Jones said, “Danny’s from a monastery and Murdock’s from an army.”

When she put it like that, the difference became crystal clear.

Matt’s so-called-army training made him less invested in Danny’s religious cleansing ritual and so he manhandled the guy right back out of the hole which he’d crawled through to begin with. When they were both out, covered in plaster dust, Matt took Danny’s little metal bowl of herbs and trashed them right in front of the guy, immune to his anguished cries.

“This,” Matt said, shaking the empty bowl at Danny like he was a naughty puppy, “Is just gonna encourage them to stay.”

“But,” Danny said.

“No buts,” Matt snapped. “No more of this shit. We’re not trying to make friends. If you really give a shit about their souls, then you’ll encourage them to move on.”

Brett was struck by the realization that Matt was the senior soldier in that relationship. That was super strange to see.

Matt gave the metal bowl back to Danny and Danny hugged it close to his chest with distraught, downturned eyes and a wobbling lip.

“No one even asked you,” he muttered. Matt jerked his way and Danny flinched back with a defensive arm up before you could even say ‘uncle.’ Matt sniffed at him and bared his teeth a little, then dropped the menacing and wandered back over to Foggy, who grumbled and started dusting him off.

“You’re _mean_ ,” Danny accused. “And I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to help them.”

“Because—” Matt started.

“Because they aren’t real,” Jessica finished before he could. “And because you’re pissing off my neighbors.”

“Trish thinks they’re real,” Danny pointed out.

“Trish is very susceptible to bullshit,” Jessica sighed. Malcolm made a face that agreed that statement.

“Would Trish happen to be with Karen right now?” Foggy asked.

Jessica and Malcolm shared an exhausted but knowing look.

“If Trish was with Page then she would never shut up about it,” Jessica said.

“She’s obsessed,” Malcolm added. “It’s kind of sweet.”

“It’s horrible,” Jessica groaned.

“It’s very sweet,” Malcolm amended. “Little baby bird trying to get senpai to notice her.”

“I am going to puke,” Jessica announced.

“Hypothetically,” Foggy said, “If Karen was summoning demons with a Ouija board in our office, would Trish be likely to partake in that?”

There was a long silence in the room.

“Oh definitely,” Malcolm said.

“100%,” Jessica agreed. Then grimaced. “Why are you asking?”

“Our office is haunted,” Matt told her.

“You think everything’s haunted,” Jones reminded him.

“That’s because we walk on the graves of dead people everywhere we go,” Matt told her solemnly.

Brett decided that this was maybe something rooted a little deeper than religion for Matt.

“It’s New York, Murdock. The whole thing’s built on the backs of the dead and the dying,” Jessica said. “And anyways, if we’re all constantly haunted, then why aren’t you freaking out all the time, then?”

“Oh, I am,” Matt assured her.

“Hi, I’m sorry to butt in here,” Foggy said, “But we could really use someone calling Trish to see if she is with our troublemaker because I need to start planning my legal defense.”

Jessica chuckled.

“You couldn’t scare either of those two even if you tried, Nelson,” she said, “But sure, gimme a sec.”

She went to pick through all the shit on her desk to find her phone and then dialed.

They all waited.

And waited.

Trish didn’t pick up. Jessica didn’t leave a voicemail. She hung up and then tried again. And then again. Then she tried Karen. And when all of that didn’t work, she chewed her lip and looked up at Matt who, for obvious reasons, didn’t meet her gaze.

“Well alrighty then,” Jessica said. “Malcolm, get your boots.”

Brett had never been on Jessica’s good side and so had never seen her work on a team. She worked mostly by locking arms with Matt while both of them shunned Danny. It was kind of cruel. Danny wasn’t the worst kid. He had loads of merits. He just didn’t carry around the other twos’ burden of edginess; that wasn’t his fault.

Danny took it more or less well.

“Me and Luke work together more than I work with those two,” he explained.

It really didn’t bother him, then?

“Nah, what business do I want with a load of wet blankets?”

Danny stopped walking when he realized that Matt and Jess had both frozen dead ahead of them and were staring back at him in complete silence.

“That’s my cue,” Danny declared, and then gunned it the opposite direction.

“They are literal children,” Brett hissed at Foggy as they pressed forward and Matt hung Danny upside down from a tree while Jessica promised (emptily) to catch him if he fell. Malcolm laughed.

Jessica was damn sure that she knew where Trish would take someone she was trying to gain the approval of. They’d hung out in this place a couple of times when they were kids, she explained. It was a sheltered little alcove wedged between a church and an ancient, stuffy restaurant. It had a great view, that alcove, but you had to climb a chain-link fence to get there.

It was very teenager-appealing.

But when they got to this mysterious alcove, no one was there; it was just filled with beer cans and cigarette butts and so they had to try somewhere else.

After a few more unsuccessful attempts, Matt, Jess, and Danny decided that the solution to this was to roleplay.

Danny was given the role of Ghost #1, Matt played Karen and Jess played Trish. They all did a shit job. But somewhere in between Danny’s artful flailing, Jessica’s horrifying valley-girl impression, and Matt’s insistence that he was a strong, independent woman, the three of them came up with the idea that they were going about this the wrong way.

And they all hurried off to harass Luke Cage.

“You three are _so_ annoying,” Luke said into his palms out back behind the bar he worked at. “So unbelievably annoying.”

“But also unbelievably charming, yes?” Matt asked him.

“You’re especially annoying.”

“Luke, if we were all former coke-addicts and adrenaline junkies with a strong need to prove ourselves to some omni-present force, where would we go?” Danny asked.

Luke surveyed him over the tops of his fingers and then rubbed at his face again.

“What? Oh, we meet at Heston’s for drinks sometimes,” Claire Temple said over Luke’s speaker phone.

Well, at least now Brett knew who balanced out all the madness on this team.

Heston’s was a dive bar which reminded Brett strongly of Josies’. Their two blonde co-conspirators were chatting at a table in the back. Karen had a notebook in front of her in addition to her phone, which she was busily scribbling in, while Trish watched with her chin rested between two palms. Trish saw the troop of them first and unsubtly panicked.

She freaked and, while Karen wasn’t looking, made large ‘go away’ gestures with her hands.

Jessica acted dumb and looked towards the door and then pointed at it. Trish nodded enthusiastically and then, upon noticing Karen looking up for a second, adopt the good old, tried and true, giggle-and-wave-dismissively technique. When Karen looked back down, Trish glared at Jessica and pointed sharply at her and then the door.

Jess pointed at herself and then the door.

Trish nodded.

Jessica pointed at herself and then the door again as though to really make sure.

Trish clenched her jaw and curled a fist, promising pain upon her sister with her face. Jessica whacked Malcolm in the side, pointed at Trish, then at herself, and then at the door and Malcolm made a wide ‘Oh!’ face and repeated the gestures and it was at that point that Brett came to understand that the two of them were taking the piss.

Jess was just here to embarrass her sister in front of her crush.

As a younger sibling who had done the exact same thing multiple times in the past, Brett could respect that.

Karen noticed Trish making an ‘I’m going fucking to pound you when I get out of here,’ gesture with her hands before Trish did and looked over her shoulder to see the rest of them. Foggy put a hand on his hip.

Karen beamed like the goddamn sun.

“Foggy,” Karen cooed sweetly once everyone was sitting in the corner with her and Trish. Foggy’s face remained sour.

“Foggy-bear,” Karen said, reaching over and rubbing light circles into his wrist with her thumb.

“Why did you curse our office, Karen?” Foggy asked flatly.

“Because I love both of you and thought we could use a little summer fun,” Karen said without missing a beat.

“Our _clients_ are terrified, Karen. Matt’s terrified—”

“I’m not,” Matt interrupted. Foggy ignored him.

“Matt is nonfunctional; you have rendered him useless.”

“I’m not, though,” Matt tried, but was resolutely ignored by the other two.

“That’s okay, he’s more of a mascot for the office than anything else,” Karen said.

Matt gawked in offense. Jessica took his hand and patted it delicately in sympathy. Danny did the same for the opposite shoulder.

“Un-curse the office,” Foggy demanded.

“I can’t,” Karen said, wriggling in her seat. “I _tried_.”

“What do you mean you tried?” Foggy demanded.

“I mean I _tried_ , but the internet only cares about putting ghosts into places, not taking them out. Everyone just keeps saying we need to help them move on.”

Brett had taken a half day for this bullshit. And he wasn’t entirely sure now that he regretted it. Watching Matt slap a hand over Danny’s mouth and tell him that if he even thought about bringing up the healing herbs, he’d dump him in the river was far more entertaining than it had any right to be. 

“UGH, I knew it,” Foggy groaned. “What are we supposed to do, Kare? We can’t work like this.”

“Uh. Well,” Trish said, “The folks online said that sometimes, you can put things in your house to scare the spirits away.”

Foggy glared at her and then glared at Karen. Karen held up her notebook with a huge list of things written under the underlined title ‘Ward off evil spirits.’

Foggy looked to Brett for strength and he almost laughed out loud.

“That’s fine, Karen, but what happens if the spirits aren’t evil?” Brett pointed out gently. “What if they’re good spirits and are just confused.”

“Then we _heal_ them,” Danny burst out from around Matt’s hand.

“Oh, right. Danny, you’re a monk, right? Can you heal them?” Trish asked. 

Danny said “what?” just as Matt and Jess said “No.”

“Danny’s not a monk, he just grew up around them,” Malcolm clarified for Trish.

“Maybe you can fist them instead?” Trish asked.

“Girl, what?” Danny repeated.

“Yeah, Danny, you gotta fist ‘em,” Jess snickered. Matt thought she was funny. Both their IQs dropped around the other. That was noteworthy.

Foggy groaned and rested his hand on his arms in despair.

“It’s fine,” Karen said, “I have an idea.”

Did she now?

“I _told_ you, I’m not a witch,” Peter snipped at their ever-growing group. His friends on either side of him looked at him in surprise at the same time which outed that lie before it was even finished. Peter noticed this and shoved the guy at his right.

“I’m not,” he said. “My aunt’s a witch. It’s different.”

May Parker was highly entertained by all of them.

“Ouija boards are bad news if you don’t know how to use them,” she lectured Karen gently.

“Yes, ma’am,” Karen said, looking properly chastised.

“Well, there’s not much to do now but to learn to live with your new friends or to coax them along on their way,” May said.

“The latter,” Foggy emphasized, “We would _love_ to do the latter.”

“Well, you can try—”

“An onion,” Peter interrupted. May patted at him and told him that that was very good remembering, which left everyone else nowhere closer to understanding anything than when they’d started.

“Most of the stuff that Peter and I do is preventative,” May explained. “Since you’ve already got spirits in your place, you might try putting salt in the corners of the room or pentagrams around your workspace.”

Pentagrams. This women was actually suggesting pentagrams right now.

“You can brush mint on the doors, too,” Peter offered.

“You could try that,” May said indulgently. “But since you used a Ouija board, I imagine that your best bet at this point might be a priest. You don’t know what kind of spirits you’ve got floating around.”

“I KNEW IT,” Matt roared from the back.

“Father, father, father, _please.”_

This man had to be a saint. No one could tolerate Matt’s agitation for as long as this guy had.

“Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, _no_ ,” Father Lantom said without missing a beat.

“But my clients!”

“Matt, this is just your imagination, son, we’ve already discussed this.”

“My clients, Father!”

“Your clients are just fine, you’re working this up into something bigger than it is.”

This was the kind of priest the world needed, Brett decided. Someone who recognized the line between superstition and anxiety.

“I’m not, though. Foggy, tell him,” Matt pleaded.

“Sir,” Danny piped up, “I have tried to heal these spirits, but they’re very stubborn.”

The priest paused and gave Danny a curious look as though trying to decide if he and Matt had the same affliction.

“Father,” Karen finally said, coming forward. “This is maybe my fault, I kind of got a little excited with a Ouija Board, so uh. Maybe you can make an exception just this one time?”

There was a long silence as Father Lantom assessed her.

He dropped his head and sighed.

Father Lantom fetched a Sister to come with him to bless the office (he refused flat out to perform any exorcisms whatsoever) and this tiny nun grabbed ahold of Matt’s ear without so much as a by your leave and yanked him down to whisper furiously at him.

“I didn’t do anything,” Matt whined like an eight-year-old.

The nun would hear none of it.

“I gave you a crucifix to put up on your wall,” she said. “Where is your crucifix?”

“I can’t put an impaled man on my wall, Sister,” Matt growled, trying to extract his ear from her grip, “I work in an office of Law. That’s basically a threat.”

“You can and you will,” the nun snapped. “You hear me?”

“Don’t have much choice,” Matt quipped back.

“Are you talking back now?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Now that right there was worth the whole day of ridiculousness.

The priest blessed the offices of Nelson, Murdock & Page. And then, for shits and giggles, he blessed the office of Alias Investigations. The Sister confiscated Karen’s Ouija board and had a very quiet but harsh conversation with her outside in the hallway.

Brett felt a little silly saying it, but as Father Lantom made his way out of the building and back towards the church with Sister Maggie at his side, he could help but notice that the place felt lighter.

Karen appeared, pouting and rubbing at her jaw.

“No more Ouija boards,” she said dolefully.

“Thank you,” Foggy said.

“’Til next year.”

“KAREN.”

Brett came back to work the next day and had to come up with a spectacular lie about how Foggy’s cousin was fine, but there had been a whole lot of drama in getting her sorted out. He texted the story to Foggy in case of cross examination and got a thumbs up in return.

 **FN:** Sister Maggie put a crucifix on the wall

 **FN:** she really screwed it in there, Matt’s been trying for ages to get it off

 **BM:** maybe tell him which way to turn the screwdriver?

 **FN:** nah it’s more fun to watch him suffer

 **BM:** foggy that’s your boyfriend

 **FN:** I know and he wants to do it himself so I’m gonna let him do it himself.

 **FN:** nevermind he’s making Karen help him. Karen is a better house husband than he’ll ever be.

 **BM:** okay so date her

 **FN:** NO

 **FN:** I haven’t forgiven her for cursing this house of law

 **FN:** oh by the way

 **FN:** Peter and his aunt are making us charms to ward off evil. I dunno if you wanted one but I don’t think that matters they want to know if you’re allergic to any kind of herb

 **BM:** they do not have to do that they literally do not

 **FN:** I’m telling them you’re not allergic

 **BM:** foggy don’t I have so much shit on my desk

 **FN:** nah man. This last week has been proof that we need all the help we can get. You will take the baby witch’s weird herbs and you will like it

 **BM:** oh my god fine

Peter put into one of his hands a little bundle of dried leaves and into the other a small collection of beads.

“Keep them with you at all times,” he said.

Mmmmm, sure. Whatever you want kid. Brett would put them in his glove box.


	17. chewing willow bark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bodies changed.  
> Bodies got older.  
> Hormones did all kind of mystical things. Same with skin. Eyes. Hair.  
> Why shouldn’t someone’s enhancements change too?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, hello! So this chapter is more just feeling out some ideas than anything else. Just me thinking out loud if you will. 
> 
> I also want to say that I read **Dredfulhapiness's** ficlet 'OFF!' the other day on tumblr which is very good and which inspired some ideas for this chapter. I would link their piece to this whole fic, but since it is only one chapter which considers some of their lovely ideas, I'm afraid that that might be confusing to folks just starting the piece.
> 
> So this is me saying thank you very much to them for writing that work! Please go read their ficlet and support their work: **https://archiveofourown.org/works/20247229**

Brett had never once claimed to know a damn thing about the nitty-gritty details of mutants or mutations or anything like that, which was why he was surprised when the Captain called him over and asked him specifically if he knew if the night crew’s powers had changed at all since he’d started to get to know them.

The idea that mutations did and could change over time was like a slap to the face.

In hindsight, after the Captain had accepted his ‘I don’t actually know, sir’ and moved on, it made perfect sense that they would.

Bodies changed.

Bodies got older.

Hormones did all kind of mystical things. Same with skin. Eyes. Hair.

Why shouldn’t someone’s enhancements change too?

Foggy stared at him emptily for a good three beats over the top of his glass of cider at Josie’s that night before snapping out of it and saying,

“Fuck.”

He then stuffed everything he had into his leather bag and Brett had to chug his own pint before chasing after.

Matt stared about a hundred times more emptily more or less at both of them in his doorway before whispering “Oh my god” and grabbing a scarf to head down the road to Jessica Jones’s place.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Jones sniffed at Matt who, upon getting a good whiff of her ‘what the fuck is the matter with you’ vibe, had stolen a swallow of her whiskey straight from the tumbler in her hand.

“Has yours not?” she asked Matt with a cock of her head.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “I guess I haven’t thought about it. There’s always so much to like, process, and so many ways to do it, that it never occurred to me that I might be doing it differently from before.”

Huh.

“Has yours changed?” Brett asked.

Jones shrugged.

“In some ways,” she said. “Can’t drink as much as I used to.”

Uh?

She’d been drinking _more_ before this?

“Yeah,” Jones said. “Way more. Now, it’s like two bottles and I’m ready for a nap. Used to put back three easy.”

 _Three_??

Jesus Christ.

Matt made a contemplative noise and scratched at the scruff on his face.

“Maybe something has changed,” he mumbled.

“Oh no, definitely changed,” Danny said. “The force used to knock me back. Threw me into a pond once.”

His own hand?

“Oh, yeah,” Danny said cheerfully. “It’s a lot to have to contain. You gotta focus really hard. Really works out your neck. I’ve put on hella muscle since I got it.”

Huh.

Danny accepted the tumbler Jones dumped a couple of fingers of whiskey into and took a sip. He grimaced and licked his lips then discreetly passed it over to Matt.

Brett glanced over at Foggy who pouted his way in thought.

“Well, like, in the immediate sense, their bodies would have to compensate for whatever it is they’re carrying around, right?” Foggy said.

They’d dropped Matt off home to go ruminate on his life and its choices. He’d been quiet all evening, trying to feel himself through to figure out if anything felt different that it used to.

Jones wondered if the scar tissue and callouses that decorated the guy’s hands and knuckles had changed his ability to feel in any way and since then, Matt had been preoccupied with picking things up and doing his hyperfocus thing with his brows drawn low in the object’s general direction.

“I guess maybe any changes that happened after that would be kind of like changes to your eyesight,” Brett hypothesized. “Like, maybe they happen so slowly you don’t even notice them until you need to do something that specifically involves them.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Foggy said, looking out into the street. “Must be hard for kids. Hormonal changes and all that.”

Yeah.

Yeah, actually, it would be wouldn’t it?

Brett found Peter the next Thursday, unusually sans mask, sitting on the floor of Nelson, Murdock, & Page after hours, filing paperwork with his friends. He didn’t understand Brett’s question. Not even after Foggy tried to rephrase it in a couple of different ways.

“I guess sometimes I feel kind of sick,” Peter eventually offered.

“Sick?” Brett tried.

“Like,” Peter waved the folder he was holding at the space in front of him. “Things get all spinny.”

“The spins,” Matt agreed on his way out of his shoebox office.

“The spins,” Peter repeated sagely. “And I feel like I’m gonna puke and sometimes I do, but sometimes I don’t.”

“Some foods make me feel like that,” Matt said offhandedly as he dug through a pile of folders on the secretary’s desk.

“Which ones?” Peter’s friend Michelle asked.

Matt hummed.

“Edible flowers,” he said. “Bitter melon. Fava beans.”

“Chestnuts,” Peter offered.

Chestnuts?

“Yeah, they’re awful,” Peter huffed. “Just the smell of ‘em. Ugh.”

Huh. Why was that raising flags in Brett’s head?

“Hey Ma?” he asked that weekend. “You know anything about chestnuts making people sick?”

His mom and sister gave him twin looks of confusion.

“Sick?” Kelly repeated. “I mean, if you’re allergic to nuts, maybe?”

No, Peter wasn’t allergic to nuts. That was Cap. Cap’s serum helped him out in that department these days, but ever since the collar situation, the poor guy had been pretty scarred by his close calls with anaphylactic shock. Brett had seen a picture of him being highly suspicious of a piece of cake at a fancy gala thing in the news the other day.

“No, I just mean like, inducing nausea,” he said. “The Spiderkid told me the other day that chestnuts make him sick.”

“Well that’d make sense,” his mom said. “Chestnuts ward spiders away, you know?”

Did they?

“Yes, that’s why I’ve always kept some around in the winter, you never noticed?”

Well, no. Apparently not.

Peter was dumbfounded upon receiving this information and abandoned Brett and Foggy and their day drinking to go frantically google it and text his aunt.

He came skidding by the restaurant Brett and Foggy were judging harshly with his buddies in tow about an hour later with a horrified expression on his face.

“Am I gonna grow more legs?” he asked the two of them over the restaurant’s dumb little barricade. It was covered in herbs that had definitely been bought just that weekend from Home Depot.

“Probably,” Foggy said.

“Dude,” Brett scolded.

“Maybe some more eyes too,” Foggy continued nonchalantly as he picked through his drenched salad for salvageable croutons.

“Oh my god,” Peter whimpered, then tore off with his friends back from whence he’d come.

“Detective, what if I start to nest?” Peter asked him in the middle of a crime scene that week. Everyone at the scene, officers and forensic folk alike, stared at the kid hanging upside down in Brett’s face.

“I?” Brett stammered.

“What if I start to eat bugs?” Peter continued. “What if I start to eat _birds_ , detective?”

“You already eat birds,” Brett pointed out as tactfully as he could.

The silence and stillness of the scene around them remained so as Peter processed this information.

“Good day, officer,” he finally said before vanishing.

His sister thought that this was a fuckin’ hoot, but Brett’s mom was more sympathetic to Spidey’s anxiety.

“Must be hard for him,” she said, “No rules. No role models. He’s what, just sixteen?”

“It’s not that he’s got _no_ role models; it’s just that everyone’s got different powers,” Brett told her. Kelly handed him another dish to dry. Amos and his friend screamed at the tv in the living room.

“That doesn’t help too much if you don’t know what’s happening to you,” his mom pointed out. “I mean, what if he gets sick with something that only he can get? What is he supposed to do then?”

Good point.

Hmm.

“Matt makes himself sick all the time,” Foggy told him later over the counter at Nelson’s Hardware. His folks were off on their yearly week-long vacation. Fogs and Candace usually took over the store in their absence, even though the handful of employees the Nelsons had could probably handle it just fine.

It soothed the parents, Foggy said, ergo it needed to be done.

“Right, from bitter melon,” Brett said. A toddler went by the counter dragging a saw and a frantic dad crashed out of aisle four to give chase.

“Mm, I mean, that’s him pretending not to be weird,” Foggy said. “I’ve caught him trying to eat dried bay leaves before.”

Dude.

“I know. Bergamot is another one. If he finds one at a market, he’ll try to eat it raw, every time,” Foggy sighed.

“The fuck is Bergamot?” Brett asked.

“The shit that makes Earl Grey tea smell fancy. I dunno, man, he loves it.”

Ah.

Wait.

“Does he try to eat tea?”

“Wouldn’t put it past him.”

Weird.

“Yeah, I think it’s ‘cause his sense of smell and his sense of taste are even more wrapped up together than the rest of us,” Foggy hummed. “So like, he’s chill with drinking vanilla extract and munching on lavender while the rest of us err on the smelling side of that kind of thing. And I mean, if we’re talking just weird food behavior, Matt’ll eat whole lemons and raw onion without batting an eye. He hates rosemary, won’t touch it. Parsley, too. We’ve got a vendetta against parsley in the office right now, which is extra weird because this is the same guy who used to survive off super-green salad in law school, and I swear he used to stuff parsley in those things.”

“Cilantro,” Brett pointed out.

“No,” Foggy said. “Parsley.”

“Definitely cilantro.”

“What? You a chef now? A botanist? Botanist Brett with his big bags of bad ideas? No. It was parsley.”

Well, there was no need to get nasty, Mr. Nelson. Also, how much is this rake?

It came to Brett’s attention that Wade Wilson and Sam Wilson were locked in a battle of wills (son?).

He wasn’t sure why. Fogs knew fuck all about it. Matt seemed to know what was going on, but he was playing dumb and dodging questions by picking at people’s clothes and trying to guess their colors again.

Karen was the one who’d brought it to Brett’s attention. She claimed that she’d heard from Castle that the feud was getting in the way of his work. She said it was some kind of counselor thing.

Sam Wilson, once he was on a healing warpath, apparently could not be stopped.

Funny how you only know one side of people.

Whatever it was that Sam wanted from Wade, he’d found that he could want it from Castle, too, and now both of them were bitching and moaning about that damn staff sergeant who wouldn’t leave them the fuck alone.

Brett tried to ask Peter about it for the new and improved notebook that he’d been handed by the Captain for the fall, but Peter just asked him if he too, thought that mint was super off-putting sometimes. Like, even in toothpaste. Wasn’t it weird how 90% of toothpastes were mint-flavored? Wasn’t that _strange_ , detective?

Suspicious even, sir?

Brett checked later and found that mint was also a natural spider-repellant.

He felt bad for awakening all these new anxieties in this poor boy.

Luke Cage told him a few days later at the scene of a break-in that he was trying to get in touch with Sam Wilson and he was willing to chat with Brett about this whole mutation-research that people said he was doing.

Brett didn’t know how he felt about the fact that his doings had become part of the rumor mill of the underground, but he figured, what the hell? Why not?

Cage was a pretty hard nut to crack when it came to cooperating with the police. He wasn’t as talkative as Danny or Jones, although you wouldn’t know it from the way that Danny nattered about their misadventures.

“Oh yeah, mine’s changed,” Cage said as Brett wrote. “Seem to get stronger all the time. It’s a little unnerving if I’m honest.”

No shit?

How long has that been going on, then?

“As long as I’ve had the enhancement,” Cage said. “Sometimes, I feel like being around others who are enhanced has some kind of effect on it, too. Like when the four of us—me, Jess, Danny and Murdock—are running around together, there’s just this feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. Might just be psychological, some kind of solidarity thing. Maybe feeling less self-conscious about not holding back. Who knows?”

Who knows, indeed?

That was fascinating, though.

What if enhancements did actually respond to each other? What if they fed off the ones around them? What if that’s why enhanced vigilantes were drawn towards each other and seemed to regularly form teams?

Hm.

Well, there was one person who Brett could ask about that.

Matt was being purposefully obtuse, Brett could pinpoint this now. He didn’t want to talk any more about his abilities and since an incident with a shitty cop in the Kitchen the week before, which had resulted in Matt nursing yet another bullet graze, he didn’t seem so hot on talking to any cop, even the one his partner was friends with.

His body language and question-deflecting all pointed to one thing and that was a neon sign reading ‘FUCK OFF.’

He tried to steal Brett’s notebook and then climbed up some fire-escapes and huddled in, up high, pouting down at Brett until he threw in the towel and accepted that he wasn’t getting anything productive out of Matt for the evening.

The next logical choice was Peter but Peter was…Peter.

Anxious.

Brett seriously felt like he’d unlocked a door or something in this kid’s head.

“I can’t see things so hot,” Peter informed him stiffly.

“In what way?” Brett forced himself to ask.

“Things up close,” Peter said. “I can’t see them. They’re all blurry.”

This sounded like a personal problem?

“But I can see far away super well,” Peter complained.

Well that explained a lot. The being up high thing, for example.

“You think I’m gonna grow more eyes?”

O-kay. Bedtime for you, little one.

“Will they grow on my face?” Peter asked.

Brett was not even attempting to entertain that Lovecraftian horror show. No thanks.

He remembered abruptly that Wade Wilson himself worked on multiple teams. Then he remembered that finding Wade was a pain in the ass and half.

God, why did this have to be so difficult?

He settled on asking Cap because he and Cap had a certain kind of rapport now.

Cap was a great resource when he was in the mood for sharing. And if you discounted the fact that he adamantly refused to share most of his life with anyone, up to and including his partners, that made him a pretty damn good option.

Cap was also interesting because really, he was the first guy who’d made it into this business as far as Brett understood it. Not the first mutant, but certainly the first enhanced person to survive the enhancement process and definitely one of the longest-living ones.

He went to see Cap out of academic and personal curiosity but found himself drawn into the Wilson v. Wilson feud.

“It’s okay,” JB consoled him, “It happens to all of us. Sammy’s got laser eyes for weakpoints.”

How the fuck had he even gotten here?

“You want to help people, detective,” JB said smoothly. “Whatever that means. Doesn’t matter. Sam’s not interested in the method, he’s interested in the result.”

Sam Wilson was going to make a damn fine Captain America soon here if he kept that attitude up.

Sam tromped down the stairs in his full Falcon gear and pointed a confident finger at Brett.

“Wilson tolerates you,” he informed Brett.

“Tolerates is generous,” Brett said. “I just happen to be personally connected to two of his teammates.”

“Tolerates,” Sam insisted. “You’re going to help me.”

Well, yes. That had been Brett’s impression here.

“The man needs therapy.”

Yes, yes. That was pretty clear.

“He’s a US vet. He has earned the right for VA services.”

Oh, no shit?

“God help me, he will _get_ those damn services.”

Uh.

So, counselor?

Pretty sure that’s not how seeking mental health support works.

“This is being proactive,” Sam said. “Wilson is a danger to himself and society in his current state. He needs medication and trauma counseling.”

Yes, yes. That was good and true and all that, but Wade also had a mighty need to eviscerate other humans so that he could continue to afford his daily bread, so?

“We’ll work on that,” Sam said. “Talk about life choices and professional development.”

Yeah, no.

Brett could totally see why Frank and Wade regarded Sam with barely concealed disgust.

But whatever. That wasn’t his damn problem.

“Okay?” he said. “Have you told this to Spidey?”

“Peter is a minor,” Sam said.

“Peter is one of _two_ minors that Wade’s taken under his wing,” Brett informed him.

He got two highly quizzical and alarmed expressions at this fact.

“Two?” JB repeated.

“Yes. Peter and a young man named Russell,” Brett said. “He’s been sighted accompanying Wade and his other team on a few missions.

Sam was scandalized.

“This is a pattern,” he snapped at JB who threw up his hands to indicate where he stood on the matter. “This is _unsafe_ behavior. For the kids, man. Think of the kids.”

Brett was. That was kind of the point.

“Wade’s gone far out of his way on multiple occasions to protect Peter,” Brett pointed out. “He cares a great deal about the kid, and I would be surprised if he didn’t feel similarly towards Russell. So if you’re talking strategy, Sam, your best bet might be to get the kids onto your side and let them pressure Wade into seeing your way of things.”

Sam said nothing, then turned around to bop back up the stairs. he cackled and disappeared back into the bedroom he’d come out of. Brett heard the distinct sound of Kevlar being chucked onto the floor.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” JB sighed.

Yikes.

“Right,” Brett said, valiantly ignoring the disaster which he’d just put into the making, “Is Steve around?”

JB sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“He is,” he said. “But I dunno if you’re gonna get very far with him.”

Steve had locked himself in his studio over the last couple of days and was busy furiously reading and rereading the works of Karl Marx.

He’d been arguing with his accountant for days, trying to break off all his royalty contracts.

“We’ve recently gotten word that we are, as Papa Marx would say, of the _bourgeois_ classes these days, and so we’ve decided that now is the time to remember our socialist roots and the time our mama spent in the IRA,” JB explained diplomatically as he knocked on the studio door.

Ah.

No one answered.

JB leaned in towards the door and called, “Steven? A member of the surveillance state is here. Are you cool to engage?”

Nothing.

“Okay, well, can I, fellow class-traitor, come in?” JB asked.

A sound of anguish burst out from behind the door.

“It’s gonna be okay, honey,” JB said. “There are ways to use capital for the common good.”

The door unlocked and Steve glared out from the two inches of space he was willing to give Brett.

“I hate this society,” he said with zero affect.

“I hate it sometimes, too,” Brett told him. “Can I ask you some personal questions?”

Steve claimed that yeah, his enhancement did actually feel different with different people around him, now that he thought about it.

“Like, me and Nat? Good. Me, Buck, and Sam? Could take on the world. But me and Thor? It’s like you’re unstoppable. Everything is possible. He’s just so—I dunno what he radiates, but it just makes everything feel within reach. It’s like when we’re fighting together, I just feel like we’re approaching this peak, where my body can do anything I ask it to. I feel stronger and faster and just, in control,” Steve explained with his hands flailing around.

Huh.

“But is Thor technically enhanced?” Brett asked.

“Thor’s a demigod,” Steve told him. “He is as enhanced as you can get while being mortal.”

Damn. Okay.

“So would you say that your own enhancements have changed over time?” Brett asked.

Steve rubbed his knuckles under his chin while he thought about it.

“Maybe?” he said. “I dunno, sometimes I think that the serum’s wearing off. I’m just.” He deflated and shifted his shoulders so that they hung low and loose. “I get tired these days. I never used to feel tired. I used to have to sleep not even half as much as others. But these days.” Steve sighed.

“Sam says I’m depressed. He said that that’s what’s driving this kind of thing, and like. He’s right, but also I’ve got this gut feeling, detective. Like it’s all going to come crashing down on me. The longer it goes on, the more tired I feel. I’m not as old as you think, I wasn’t awake in the ice. I’m not even forty up here, you know.” He tapped at his temple. Then dropped his fingers and his eyes. “Bucky’s way older. He was awake. He’ll know better. He gets tired too these days. His healing factor isn’t what it used to be.”

Brett left the Cap residence with his notebook in hand, a bad taste in his mouth, and a weight in his belly.

If Cap was right, then what would happen to him when the serum finally wore off?

Would he die?

Or would he just suffer for the rest of however long it took him to reach old age?

The man had already been alive for a century, to force him to endure another in ill health seemed cruel. Cruel and unusual.

And that was just Cap. What would happen to the others? What if one day the mutations kept changing and transforming to the point where Peter’s worst nightmares actually came true.

Was this a slow process into making these people into the monsters they fought?

Fuck.

No wonder the boy was fixating.

There is nothing scarier than becoming the villain of your own story.

He found Wade accidentally. Or rather Wade found him. It was hard to care and he felt too heavy to ask any more questions that day.

“It keeps changing, detective,” Wade said.

The rumor mill of the underworld must have really been churning. Wade already knew his questions.

“So I’ve gathered,” Brett said.

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was making him feel like shit and there was not a whole lot he could do here to help anyone.

Wade made a sound that Brett realized belatedly was a sigh. His armor rasped as he folded himself down to join Brett on the park bench.

It was dark.

Wade’s time of night.

The concrete path that wound through the little grassy space looked blue. Almost like a tiny, rushing river.

“It’s not anything special, Mahoney,” Wade said. “It’s not just mutations that change. People change. Every second of every day. We shed skin cells every minute. Change clothes. Change our brains—always deciding what’s wrong and what’s right, day by day. There’s always new shit that we’ve gotta be wrapping our minds around. How to be old, how to be sick, how to be healthy, how to talk to other people. Hey, you ever heard the saying that you never step into the same river twice?”

The person sitting next to him wasn’t Deadpool.

“I’ve heard it,” Brett said.

This man was a vet. A young man still, technically, who’d spent his youth bathed in trauma and his present days drenched in blood.

He’d seen and he’d taken more lives than even Brett, professional homicide detective, had and would ever, God willing.

“My old pal Lucky used to say that that was bullshit, there’s only so much water on earth. You’re gonna encounter the same water somewhere, at some point,” Wade said.

Brett chuffed a laugh.

“Was Lucky your dad?” he asked.

Wade snorted.

“Not the point. What I’m trying to say is that if you ain’t some forest asshole named Lucky, and you’re down with that hippie logic around rivers, then it only makes sense that you never meet the same person twice. Not even the folks you’ve grown up with or partnered yourself to. So gettin’ yourself all up and twisted over whether or not us poor mutated saps got it hard or harder than anyone else ain’t doing nothing for no one. The facts as they are, Mahoney, are that you shouldn’t be pityin’ all these folks because they’re gonna shrivel away with their mutations.”

Wade peeled off his mask and leaned his chin on his palm. His elbow on his knee.

“They’re gonna die young,” he said. “That’s what we really oughta be pityin’ ‘em for.”

Wade Wilson was a man who could never die.

He was more immortal that even Thor.

“How are you gonna die, Wade?” Brett asked.

Wade scoffed.

“Well, I ain’t,” he said. “Not ‘til my work here is done. So long as business is good, I got a reason to be here. But the second the killin’ and maimin’ ain’t fun anymore, well, you can count me out.”

Brett watched him.

“But how?” he asked.

Wade’s shoulders heaved.

“Can’t tell you, detective,” he said. “Or else I’d have to kill you.”

Yeah.

Yeah, because if anyone else knew, then Wade wouldn’t be the one in control anymore.

Brett leaned back against the bench. Wade stayed with him for another few minutes, then redonned his mask and stood up, Deadpool again.

“Sam fuckin’ Wilson’s corruptin’ my kids,” Wade informed him. “You got anything to do with that?”

“He wants to help you,” Brett said.

“Yeah, I know,” Wade groused. “Shit’s annoying as hell. And going through the kids? Man, that’s low.”

Ehn, not really.

“I’ll tell him to go through Red next time,” Brett said.

“Oh, hell no. Red’s soft as butter. The second Wilson realizes that, he’s a goner.”

Yeah, fair.

“Hey, tell him to go through Cable,” Wade decided. “Nate’ll _love_ that.”

Brett chuckled.

He didn’t doubt it.

“Tell me,” Peter said, holding Matt’s face with just enough superstrength that he couldn’t escape no matter how hard he struggled.

Foggy bit his lip and looked over to Brett.

“You need something, detective?” he asked pleasantly. Happy to be back in the office and not standing at a till all day in a bright red apron, probably.

Technically, Brett needed one of these idiots to confirm his current suspect’s gang membership, but honestly? This was a much better use of his time.

“ _Tell me_ ,” Peter insisted.

“Kid, you have _two_ fuckin’ eyes, no one knows this better than you,” Matt snarled.

“That’s not the question,” Peter snarled right back.

“You smell normal. You sound normal. You’re not turning into a goddamned spider, alright?” 

“If I lay eggs at any point in the next year, this will be on you, you hear me?” Peter threatened. “I’ve asked. I’ve sought help. If it happens, it is not my fault and I will not hear a single egg-joke from either you or the abominable DP, are we clear?”

“Let go, for god’s sake, you tiny demon.”

“Are we clear, Devil?”

“For fuck’s sake—yes. Yes, we’re clear. Get _off already_.”

Yeah, a much, _much_ better use of his time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a note: I am aware that Peter's eyesight is improved in certain versions of SM. But that is not the case in this one.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Nodus Tollens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19441315) by [BananasofThorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BananasofThorns/pseuds/BananasofThorns)




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